isakstein

Do people still use this thing?

2008-06-30T07:57:42Z

Guys, I have a question. Is it safe to ride the bus in American cities, specifically Nashville? I have to get downtown from the airport next Monday and I can't afford a cab, but I am wary. Advice welcomed!

Also, HELLO! How is everyone? I have news. I am moving to Canterbury at the beginning of August because (whisper it) I am a teacher. Yes, I am being entrusted with the inspiring and shaping of young minds. Or at least forcing them to do their Latin prep.

A Poem

2007-12-07T22:14:05Z

They say, yeah, that you should write what you know.
Know? No,
No, I don't think so.
See, I don't know nothing, me,
With my carefully-cultivated slack-jawed gape
Like a Big Brother contestant,
Or a vandal caught on tape,
Or someone on one of those shows hosted by
The ubiquitous Simon Cowell.
(Ubiquitous? Now that's a ten-dollar word
Not something you've probably heard
On Location Location with Kirsty and Phil,
Or that Channel 5 documentary about 'Doctors Who Kill',
Or Hollyoaks.)

So maybe I know more than I'm letting on,
I' playing my ignorance for jokes
Because when I was at school,
It wasn't, like,
Cool to know the answer.
And if you put your hand up, well,
It was social suicide.
Know what I mean?

So yeah, I don't know nothing
Like the witness to a mugging who
'never saw who done it', or
Paris Hilton acting proud of being dumb,
It just seems easier to lurk in the shadows
Of your own 'dunnos',
Your wilful lack of intellectual curiosity -
Hell, you ain't no monstrosity
For being thick.

Go ahead and stick two fingers up at
Reading books,
Glut yourself on a quick fix, no-effort life of
Ready meals and ready fucks.
Write what you don't know,
Don't care, not my problem -
And when it all falls to pieces and it
Just ain't fair,
You can wash your hands of it.
Not my fault.

And don't come running to me,
Because I don't know nothing, me.
I don't want to know, yeah?

:D

2007-10-19T21:17:32Z

Happy birthday, blythely!!

hee hee crack fic

2007-10-09T10:28:42Z

This is totally dumb. But maybe kind of amusing? Supernatural crack, based on the premise devised by, I think, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett that all tapes, if left in a car long enough, will turn into ABBA compilations.

They’re on their way to Nebraska – nothing too weird, a couple of dead cows and a gas station explosion that could be the work of a demon but is probably just the result of some idiot dropping a cigarette butt on the forecourt. Sam’s in a bad mood, tiny frown creasing his forehead as he stares out the window at the nothing landscape while Dean drums on the steering wheel in time to Metallica, or almost in time.

“Dean.”

“What?”

“How many times do we have to listen to this song? Because if I’m counting right, this is the seventh time today, and it’s driving me crazy.”

Dean rolls his eyes. “Dude, you have no taste.”

“Just because it’s not to my taste, doesn’t mean I have no taste,” says Sam, a little pedantically, crossing his arms over his chest like one of those grave carvings of dead dudes Dean’s seen in really old churches.

“Whatever. Listen to this song and tell me it’s not awesome.”

Dean turns the cassette over, eyes on the horizon where the dirty ribbon of the highway shades into sky. The tape deck swallows the cassette with a satisfied whirr, and Dean leans back against his seat, all ready to rock out. But instead of a barrage of drum beats and snarling guitars, the opening chords of Dancing Queen come blaring out of the speakers at 90 decibels. Dean’s head whips round and he stares at the tape deck in accusatory disbelief. Sam shouts with laughter, bad mood forgotten.

“Whoa, since when were you an ABBA fan? That’s hilarious!”

“Wait, what? Have you been sneaking tapes into my car again? What did I tell you about that, man?”

Dean reaches out and turns the volume down, the electronic plunk of the keyboards jarring against the engine’s low hum.

“It’s your tape, Dean. You just turned it over, remember?”

“This is not my tape. It was bad enough when you taped The Editors over Deep Purple but this? Is seriously not on.”

Sam protests, grinning ear to ear, “Hey, don’t blame me for your heinous lapse in judgement; I mean, we’ve all been there, though I have to say ABBA is taking it to a whole new level.”

Dean scowls. “Shut up and gimme another tape.”

Sam grabs one at random from the glove box and ejects the offending cassette. The tape deck expels it with a clunk and Sam slings it into the back seat, where it lands in a greasy fast food carton. Dean glances at Sam.

“You ever touch my tapes again, I’m gonna break your legs.”

“I swear it wasn’t me,” says Sam, his voice thick with amusement. “Look, I’m putting another one in, okay?”

“Finally,” says Dean, “some real music.”

But it’s ABBA again, asking if he hears the drums, Fernando, and Sam cracks up, hunched forward in his seat with his face screwed up in glee. “Oh my God, Dean, what is this?!”

Dean scowls, pissy, and jabs at the off-button, saying “these are NOT my tapes, Sam, and this had better not be your idea of a joke.”

Sam snickers, and then stops himself because Dean’s hands are clenched tight on the wheel and it’s obvious he’s getting mad. “Honestly, Dean, I did not switch your tapes. Maybe it was, like, a music demon or something.”

“Oh, don’t give me that. There’s no such thing and also? Shut up.”

So Sam throws that tape into the back seat too and roots around in the glove for another one.

“Let me see that.” Sam hands it over, not meeting Dean’s eye because he knows for sure he’ll start laughing again if he does. Dean scrutinizes the tape, bringing it up to his face and inspecting it minutely until the car swerves into the oncoming lane and Sam yells, “Dude! Eyes on the road!” ‘Led Zeppelin’ is scrawled on the tape’s peeling white sticker in Sharpie, so Dean gives it back to Sam and says, “Right, put it on.”

But it’s Waterloo, and by this point Sam’s quietly having hysterics in the passenger seat, fraying cuffs jammed into his mouth as Dean fast forwards through the tape, getting more and more agitated as ABBA follows ABBA follows ABBA, his shoulders vibrating with perplexed frustration, and his head is full of Swedish women in cat suits, which really isn’t helping his concentration.

Eventually he goes through every single tape in the box, even the ones he hasn't listened to in years and keeps meaning to throw out, but they're all the same. The back seat of the car's littered with cassettes, the black ribbon spooling out of them like intestines where he's pulled them apart in rage, but the only one that isn't an ABBA compilation seems to be The Eurythmics' Greatest Hits, which is almost as bad.

Finally he pulls over in an empty truck stop and slams his hands on the steering wheel like, what the fuck is going on here? Sam pulls himself together; wiping his eyes on the sleeve of his sweater, and says, “I know you're pissed but this? Is seriously hilarious.”

Dean glares at him. “Those are all my tapes, man. I've had some of those since high school, for fuck's sake. How did this happen?”

Sam shrugs. “Sorry, man, I’ve got no idea. But look, since those are clearly no good, I've got an Arcade Fire album we could listen to instead.”

Dean shoots his brother an angry stare, but there's nothing he can do, because it's either that or ABBA and he hates driving in silence, so he lets Sam put his goddamn album on and drives white-knuckled and furious all the way to Nebraska, where he stops off at an electronics superstore and finally buys a CD player and a bunch of CDs for the Impala, muttering “Whatever, Samuel, you win, okay?” under his breath.

Sam shrugs, still on the verge of laughter, and says “Hey, great, that’s cool. But, er, Dean? Seriously wasn’t me.”

“Fuck off,” says Dean, tightening the last screw on the new, chrome-effect CD player and pursing his lips in appraisal. He has to admit, the sound quality is better, but it’s not the same. They drive out of Lincoln to the suspect gas station, Dean silent and sulky, Sam resigned but still amused, and The Immigrant Song only half masks the dejected sound of the ruined cassettes slithering around on the back seat. They’re just pulling up to the charred station shell when the CD player starts to skip.

“Cheap piece a shit,” says Dean, “knew it was a bad idea.” He presses the skip-forward button a couple of times as Sam peers out the window at the gas station, looking for signs of supernatural activity. The CD player squeaks, and then starts up again. Dean sighs in relief.

Mamma mia, here I go again.

The Bad Luck Child

2007-08-11T17:31:41Z

Old man in a bar down in New Orleans be telling a story, and it goes like this:

“Once upon a time there was a girl, and she was a bad luck child. Her mammy, well, the Master called her Ethel, and no one knew what name her own mammy gave her, so Ethel’s how she was called. This Ethel, she was a fine looking girl, and one day she’s working in the Mistress’ garden when the Master comes up to her tending to the roses and upshot of it is, she fell upon shame. Nine months done gone and her pains begin, and oh boy everybody on the whole plantation felt them pains. Near about screamed the hut down, Ethel, pushing that baby out. The men in the fields they worked ‘til the sweat poured down their backs, singing loud so they wouldn’t have to listen, and the women sat round shaking they heads and said it all come of mixing what ought not to be mixed and nothing good would come of it. Well, eventually nature took its course, and out popped not one baby but two. One was plump and brown and wailed fit to send the devil back to hell, but the other was shrivelled and black like a dried up pear, and she never made a single sound. The women they crossed themselves and prayed to all the gods, because when a baby kills its twin you know that child is a bad luck child. But Ethel, she soothed the live baby so it stopped wailing and began to suck, and wouldn’t hear none of what the others had to say. The women took the dead baby and they buried it where the dogs wouldn’t find it, and Ethel she named her girl Petal – said it would have been Rose but half a twin ain’t complete and it’d be lying to pretend otherwise.

“Petal grew up tall and strong, knowing she was bad luck, and whenever the cotton withered on the stems or a storm drowned the crop, people would point at her on her little mat and say, ‘she done brought the rain, she done brought the drought’. Petal just sat there smiling and hardly never answered, and folk started to say she was touched. Well, touched or not, pretty soon she was old enough to work in the fields, and pretty soon after that she was old enough to get into trouble like her mammy before her, and sure enough she did. The Master bought a new boy, come all the way from Tennessee, with shiny white teeth and skin so black it was blue. He sat in the hut that first night and didn’t say a word, but he smiled big and sad at Petal and she felt like he’d told her his soul. Old Prudence, so old she was born on the boat, she took one look at him and declared he was a devil in disguise, and wasn’t no surprise he should make a bee-line for that bad luck girl, them two was made for each other. Petal made space on her mat and she and the boy sat face to face, not talking, just staring at each other like they’d never seen a person before.

"Three days later he ran away, was halfway to the next town before the Master’s dogs got a hold of him. They brought him back his legs ripped all to shreds and tied him to a post in the yard. Petal sat with him and neither of them spoke – matter of fact, nobody ever heard them say one word to each other that whole time they were together. The end came quick, and the boy from Tennessee reached out his hand and put it on Petal’s flat brown belly and flashed her those big white teeth. Then he died, quiet as a mouse, the only sound the buzzing of the flies on his poor broken legs.

"Soon enough, Petal’s belly starts to swell and Ethel, she hangs her head and sees she bore a bad luck child after all. The women mutter dark things under their breath and keep to the other side of the hut, in case such badness be catching, but Petal just smiles to herself and strokes her swollen stomach, cooing to the dead-daddy baby inside.

"The baby comes quiet one baking afternoon in the fields, into the gray dust and prickly broken cotton stems, and Petal picks him up and puts him to her breast, and then she carries on picking, for there’s nothing else she can do. She calls the baby Tennessee, and he’s a handsome looking boy, near dark as his daddy and smiling all the while. Even the sourest of the women soften to him, and the men shrug and say maybe the devil took a holiday the day he was born.

"One day Ethel falls down in the fields and don’t get up again, thirty four and bone tired. The men carry her back to the hut and somebody fetches Petal from the well, Tennessee clinging tight to her skirt. Petal drops to her knees and begins to wail like she’s new born over again, crying mama, mama, don’t you die. Ethel lifts up a hand and quiets her, saying hush now, child, don’t be raising all this fuss. Petal swallows her sobs and sits holding her mama’s thin hand, and Ethel she smiles like a skull and says, you smell them roses, Petal? Ain’t they beautiful? Petal says, sure, mama, I smell them. Then Ethel she breathes a shallow shaky breath, says bad luck child and doesn’t breathe no more. Petal strokes her mama’s gray face ‘til all the warmth is gone from it, and Tennessee crawls into her lap and says mama, ain’t you gonna say hello to the lady? What lady, says Petal, kissing his little head, and Tennessee looks up at her with those big old coal black eyes and says, her name’s Rose. She came to take granmammy away, didn’t you see? Well Petal she freezes up and holds onto her boy real tight, and she whispers in his ear don’t you be saying you saw her to nobody else, this be a secret between you and me. Tennessee nods and wriggles away, for he’s just a baby and he don’t understand why his mama’s afraid, he don’t know he’s a bad luck child as well.

"Well time passes and Tennessee, he’s near to grown and the Mistress she says it’d be a pity to waste such a handsome Negro in the fields, and wouldn’t he look fine in a new blue uniform, a-waiting on me in the house. So Tennessee gets a shirt and a pair of cotton britches and learns how to open doors and wave a fan not too fast, not too slow. He steals food for his mama when he can, and Petal she’s proud of her boy. Tennessee is fifteen years old and he wakes up one morning on the verandah where he’s been sleeping in the heat, and he can’t move his legs. Elias, he says to the old slave by him, Elias, I can’t move my legs. Elias he sits up and squints at Tennessee with his rheumy yellow eyes, then says in surprise, boy, your legs done withered away to nothing in the night! Tennessee looks down and sure enough, his legs be grayish-brown below the knee and shrivelled like the flesh just melted off of them. Elias he gets up and says wait there, I’ll get your mama, and Tennessee calls back I ain’t going anywhere, Elias, you count on that.

"Petal comes running, shirt flapping open round her thighs, mouth a big round hole in her face, takes one look at her boy’s withered legs and faints dead away. She comes to and the Mistress is on the verandah, fretting what people would think if they saw such a commotion, this is no way to keep a house, but she’s fond of Tennessee in her way and she don’t drive Petal off. They pull Tennessee to his feet, Petal and Elias, and he stands wobbly like a new born foal, but he don’t fall down and he whispers to Petal, last night I had a dream about my daddy and his legs was all ripped to shreds. Petal she nods and says it was the dogs, honey child, it was the dogs. Why’s this happened to me, mama, he asks, and Petal strokes his head, reaching up to him, saying you and me, Tennessee, we’re bad luck and no bones about it.

"Tennessee learned to walk again, slow and crippled like an arthritic old man, and the Mistress gave him a pair of long trousers to hide his withered legs. Everybody knowed how he’s bad luck now, like his mama before him, you can hide his legs but you can’t hide his soul. Well soon enough the war breaks out and folks are saying how there’ll be a secession, and the Master and his son they go off to fight and the son comes home in a bag and the Master he don’t come home at all. Well, Tennessee being up in the big house with the Mistress grieved and alone, he hears things, and one of the things he hears is how those slaves as escape to the North be considered contraband and don’t have to be slaves no more. So Tennessee goes to his mama on his withered legs and says mama, I’m going to escape, come with me. But Petal, she looks at her son and says baby, I’m too old for such things and besides, how you going to escape on them no-good legs of yours? Tennessee just shrugs and says I’ll do it, mama, you wait and see. Sure you won’t come with me? Not with my bad luck, Petal says, you just make sure and send for me when you’re up there a free man. She hugs her son tight to her and murmurs in his ear, you get in trouble, call on your daddy, you just call.

"Tennessee waits ‘til dark one night and then he starts off half-running, half-stumbling ‘til he comes to the river, and he sets to wading to throw the dogs off the scent. Soon enough there’s barking and howling raised up in the woods all along the river bank and Tennessee splashes faster through the water with his legs atremble and about to give. The barking gets closer and there’s torches blazing through the trees and men shouting, and Tennessee falls to his knees and calls daddy, daddy! The men with the torches hear him calling and they fall about laughing, hear that, the damn fool nigger be crying for his daddy, ain’t that the cutest thing you ever heard? Well they ain’t laughing for long, for there’s a man rising out of the trees ahead, and his teeth is shiny white and his skin’s so black it's blue. This man, he’s eight feet tall and ringed in fire, and the dogs cringe and whine at the sight of him, and first one and then another turns tail and flees back to the plantation, ‘til there ain’t no dogs left at all. The men they drop their guns and torches, cringing like their no-good hounds, and the fiery man moves toward them on legs all bleeding and torn. Tennessee he gets painfully to his feet, watching from the river, and his daddy turns to him, eyes flashing red, and he roars in a hell-voice loud enough to shake the trees, RUN!

"Well Tennessee, he don’t need telling twice. He runs, and it’s like his legs be whole again, so fast he flies through the water, running ‘til the plantation be far behind, and he don’t stop running ‘til he’s in Fort Monroe, Virginia. But after that his legs never worked right again, and that bad luck boy be crippled ‘til the end of his days.”

Someone buys the old man a drink. “What happened to his mama?”

The old man drinks the drink. “His mama, well, she never made it to the North, though he looked for her up and down. I guess her bad luck got her in the end.”

“Bullshit,” says someone else. “You ain’t said a true word all night, boy.”

The old man drinks someone else’s drink, says you just ain’t been listening right, gets up and walks out on his two old withered legs. And that’s a true story, you heard it from me.

more HARRY POTTAH pictures

2007-07-25T19:18:47Z

snape, lily, petunia

professor severus snape enquires of the universe:

The Deathly Hallows

2007-07-22T12:47:24Z

Oh, Severus. You were always my favourite. :(

_peapod @ 2007-07-04T22:43:00

2007-07-04T21:43:42Z

I GOT A FIRST.

SPN FIC

2007-05-10T18:45:28Z

AU, Mary, Dean, Sam

It wasn’t Mary who died in that nursery fire; it was John. Faulty wiring, the fire department said, and given that John had wired the house himself – why waste money on an electrician? he’d said. I know what I’m doing – Mary was prepared to believe them. She cried, not too hard nor too long, then picked herself up and made the best of it.

They moved to Virginia, where Mary had a sister: older, sour-faced, with a preference for cats over kids. She was scared of Mary’s boys, especially the eldest, who was loud and whose play fights with his brother too often spilled over into the real thing. They only stayed with her a couple of months, then Mary got a job as a doctor’s receptionist – nothing much, just enough to pay the bills – and moved downstate, to a backyard country town where there’d be plenty of space for Dean to run around.

So they grew up, two little boys with an overworked mom and no dad, nothing remarkable then or now, and nothing much happened. Sam was a quiet kid, smart but too shy to show it yet. Never any trouble to his mom, said the neighbours, meaning ‘not like that brother of his’. Dean grew up wild, hanging around with the kids who learned to shoot at six or seven and came to school barefoot in summer. He lost his virginity at thirteen, messy and short in a tobacco field, to a girl whose daddy came by their house one night and threatened Dean with a tire iron. “You don’t keep that no-good bastard of a son of yours away from my daughter, I’ll kill him,” he screamed at Mary, who stood on the porch in her worn pink robe and said nothing, her mouth a thin set line. Dean hid in Sam’s room, under the bed amidst the dust bunnies and discarded comic books. Sam didn’t get it. “What did you do?” he asked, poking his head upside-down under the bed frame, nose to nose with his brother. Dean scowled. “Tell you when you’re older,” he said.

Dean started high school, and three weeks later the Principal called Mary in for a meeting. “I’m worried about your son,” he said, genuine crease in his brow. Mary made light of it. “He’s a real live-wire, all right,” she said, saw the Principal take in her dollar-store shirt, the lines at the side of her mouth that stayed, lately, even when she wasn’t frowning. “Your husband –“ the Principal began. “He died,” said Mary. “A long time ago.” The Principal nodded like that explained everything. “Boy needs a role model,” he said. “Why doesn’t Dean try out for the football team?” He wasn’t a bad man.

Football lasted a month, maybe two, until Dean got in a fight with a junior called Dwayne who ripped on him in the locker room and called his mom a whore. Dwayne went home with six stitches and a purple eye. The coach took Dean to one side and said, “I’m sorry, son, but we got no space for guys that can’t work as a part of a team, you understand?” Dean said, “I’m not your damn son,” and, “I don’t want to be on the fuckin’ team anyway,” and that was the end of his football career.

He dropped out of high school midway through his junior year, just stopped showing up for class. It took Mary, who’d lost the receptionist job and was working in a diner off the interstate, six weeks to notice. Sam told her, in the end, twelve years old and three times winner of the county spelling bee. Dean didn’t hit him, wanted to but didn’t. Went and fucked the doctor’s new receptionist instead. Her name was – who cares – and she had bottle blond hair that was splitting at the ends. Dean yanked a handful when he came, brittle strands that looked like old frayed rope.

Sam started high school two years later, when Dean was working as hired labour for the daddy who’d threatened to kill him all those years ago but either didn’t recognise him, or no longer cared. The Principal’s face had fallen at the name Winchester, risen again when he read Sam’s middle school transcripts. The next time Mary attended the school, it was to see Sam’s winning entry at the science fair. “I’m so proud of you,” she whispered, and Sam squirmed away from her, mortified, hoping to god no one had seen them together. Mary adjusted her skirt, unintentionally too tight but someone had emptied the cash jar she kept in her closet for emergencies, so she was making do. She’d spent fourteen years making do: it was habit by now.

Dean was eighteen and he came home drunk, punched a wall and pissed all over Mary’s small neat lawn. Sam was taller now, still scrawny though, and Dean let himself be pinned to the ground as Sam yelled in his face, voice still not quite broken, why you always got to show up like this, Dean, what the hell is your problem?! Eventually Dean got bored, threw his brother off and went into the kitchen to get a beer. “I’m gonna be a daddy,” he told the contents of the refrigerator. “What?” said Sam, unhearing or refusing to hear. “I said,” Dean told him, knocking the lid off a bottle on the edge of the kitchen table, “I got some chick pregnant. You know how that works, right?”
“Shut up,” said Sam, scowling. “Who? Are you going to tell mom? What are you gonna do?” Dean shrugged, drank his beer. He smiled at Sam, the usual shark-tooth grin but taut around the edges. “No idea.”

Mary didn’t hit the roof like she thought she would – truth be told, she’d been expecting this since Dean was hardly older than Sam, who still hadn’t kissed a girl. “What will you do?” she asked, forty three and showing it. Mary hadn't thought of John for years - first because it was too hard, then because she found she didn't want to. She thought of him now, looking at her son who was so much like his father, finding it funny that she'd never noticed before. She remembered the look of panic on John's face when she'd told him she was pregnant, how he'd asked if she was sure until finally, in exasperation, she'd shown him the stick with its two blue lines. She'd thought he might leave.

“Stick around, I guess,” said Dean, not looking at her. “Kid needs a dad.” Mary couldn’t tell if that was meant to hurt, but anyway, next day when she got up, Dean was gone. Mary sat on his unmade bed, drank too much coffee, wiped her eyes and went to work.

"How you doin'?" one of her regulars asked as she refilled his mug. Mary sighed, smiled, answered like she always did. "Oh, you know. Making do."

This is Sparta

2007-05-05T22:34:20Z

We climb the hill together, Alexandra and Mano and I, along with the others – twenty all told, our hair curled and scented with incense, clutching our offerings to Helen. Helen the goddess; Helen the princess. Helen the whore. I hold a statue of chryselephantine, a girl naked and bejewelled, a precious thing my father tells me came from Egypt. Egypt lies across the Aegean, a land of wonders, further even than Cyprus. Some say Helen went to Egypt. We say she returned to Sparta. Why else would we honour her? I hope Helen thinks my gift a worthy offering. If she do not – what? A fruitless marriage, a life without honour; passed over for some other woman worthy of the goddess. If she shows herself to us, our gifts have been accepted. This is all I have been told. I am afraid to behold the goddess.

Mano turns to me when I lag behind, pressing my statue to my chest, fearful now to part with it. She takes my hand. “Come on, Hebe, don’t be scared.” I follow her, reluctant, the incense heavy on my temples and in my nostrils. At the head of the procession march auletes, flute-girls, playing unaccustomed tunes. I am used to wedding hymns or frantic songs to Dionysus, taut with the beat of the tympanon. This melody is different: older, more haunting. The word for it is pothos. Yearning. Did Helen yearn for Sparta, when she stood on the walls of Troy and beheld an empty, foreign plain? Tonight, if I see her, I shall ask.

Mano is tugging at my hand, eager to arrive. She has been looking forward to these festivities for months, since her blood first came. I, for whom the blood is still an unnerving novelty, am less certain. The song changes: it is wilder now, presaging what is to come. In front of me, Alexandra dances through the gorse, her robe slipping from one shoulder to expose the curve of her white breast. She cries out, iau iau, and the other girls echo her.

The light is fading, the attendants’ torches spark like the god’s thunder in the dusk. Mano’s face is wine-dark. The shrine rises out of the purpling horizon, stark and black. There is a feast within, and wine in terracotta amphorae. More than this: there is Helen. I am fourteen. Tonight is the proof of my existence.

At the hill’s crest the attendants will leave and we will become women, together, through the long night. First, though, there is the business of our hair. Mano and I are the last to reach the entrance to the shrine, where the others have gathered. Their excited chatter flies above our heads like the beating of wings, insubstantial. When we have all gathered the lead attendant mounts the stone steps and turns to face us. She is flanked by two slaves, their faces impassive. They have seen this before. “Girls,” says the attendant, “girls of Sparta. Tonight you become women of Sparta, mothers of warriors and men.” She holds a razor in her right hand. “Who will be first?”

I was not first; the ground at my feet is covered with hair. Most of the hair is brown, though there are tendrils of blond shining like gold in the heap. Blond haired girls are sacred to Helen. My hair is not blond. The attendant rests a hand on my shoulder. “It’s finished,” she says, “go to the sacrifice.” My head feels light, unburdened; I run a hand over my scalp and feel the soft prickles against my palm. A woman’s head, ready to rest on a woman’s body. There are only two girls left, the rest have already gone to the sacrifice. I follow.

The bull is unsuspecting. It nods its huge head when the oatmeal is sprinkled, blows hot breath from wet nostrils. Why a bull for Helen? The bull is the creature of Theseus, who raped her. Why not a swan?

I have witnessed many sacrifices, but I still gasp when the knife hits home. We all gasp together like the surge of the sea, and the taste of copper fills my open mouth. Then we set to butchering the creature, twenty of us, slicing sinew and muscle, up to our elbows in entrails and gore. The bull’s blood is slick and glorious on my bare arms. I raise a wrist to my mouth and lick at the wet salt warmth. Mano smiles at me. “I knew you would relax.”
“A Spartan is never relaxed,” I reply, half-serious, “but always on his guard.”
“Her guard, you mean.”
“Both.”

After the appropriate parts – the thigh bones, the innards, the tongue – have been burnt as an offering to the gods, and the meat is roasting over a shallow fire pit, we gather our gifts for Helen and process to the inner sanctum. The smell of burnt flesh is still strong in my nostrils, but the place’s holiness is tangible nonetheless. A statue looms in the semi-darkness, barely illuminated by the single pitch torch we may bring to the goddess.
“Helen,” breathes Alexandra.
She is tall – taller than any man I have seen, and beautiful. Her eyes are hollows in her sandstone face. Her hair is carved ringlets, her necklace stony beads. Reverently, we file up to her, trying not to jostle, hushing the giggles of those for whom the solemnity is too much. We will be women. We do not laugh. When I bend to place my statue at her feet, setting it in a groove worn smooth by countless other offerings from countless other girls, I feel a light hand brush the back of my new-shorn neck. Helen, or maybe just the wind.

Now the formalities are over. All that remains is for us to dance away our girlhood, footloose in the rocky hills of Sparta, to dance until all that remains is a hard shell to birth children and bear up. I have never been good at dancing. The night’s one promise remains unspoken: Helen may come, between the torches and the wine, golden-glimpsed in darkened corners or beneath the straggling firs. I drink my wine, unmixed and thick as honey. The music has started again: far down the mountain, the aulos-girls play up to heaven and to us. Alexandra dances with Meroe; Mano dances with Adea. I dance awkwardly, alone, through the rushing of the night as the flutes pipe higher and higher and mix with a drum that may be the beating of my heart. Once I am a woman, I shall never dance again. The thought makes me frenzied, frenzies us all as we stamp the gorsey hill. The cry rises up: Eleni. O Helen.

Near dawn, the wine is all drunk and many sleep where they have fallen, white limbs tangled in girlish embrace. Mano claims to have seen her, from the corner of her streaming eyes, lurking shy amidst the bushes. My Helen is not shy: Mano was drunk, that’s all – Meroe too, when she said she danced with her, all golden tresses leaping in the torchlight and lips stained with glistening fat from the sacrifice. I have wandered afar, the torches’ embers barely smouldering in the distance. Fir trees enfold me like bedclothes but I cannot sleep. I have not seen her. How can I be a Spartan woman? The blood is not enough, nor will the pretended rape suffice, when my father’s choice of husband spies me in my boy’s garb and takes me to his bed. This second blood, the blood of lost virginity, makes me a woman only. Without Helen, it is nothing.

Dawn is already beginning to streak the sky with red when I sink to my knees, exhausted. I have given up. I will never be a woman. The thought comforts as it terrifies. And then I see her. She stares straight up at me, shorn and beautiful, and my heart leaps like a foal leaving its mother’s side for the first time. For a long time we gaze at each other. She is not frightening, as I thought. Her face is sad. I reach out to her but she ripples and fades. I withdraw my hand: one may not touch a goddess. Gradually, she returns, takes shape.
“Do you yearn,” I ask, “for Sparta?”
“Always,” she replies.

It is late morning when I wake, my head close to a still pool of water that reflects the sun. Alexandra is prodding me with a stick.
“Get up, sleepy head,” she laughs, “we’ve to be at the city by noon.”
I rub sleep from my eyes. “I saw her,” I say. “Helen, I mean.”
“We all did,” says Alexandra. “How could we be women if not?”
She has changed, overnight; I know that she will not dance back to the city but stride, her thighs conveying the power that resides in her. I get up, go back to other women. They stride down the hill to Sparta.

I stride too.

telemachos

2006-11-09T20:54:45Z

After twenty years of mum moping about the palace,
Wringing her hands and complaining, I decided:
Enough is enough.
So I ran away
To see if I could find this guy, Odysseus,
Who everybody said was so amazing
And by bringing him back make my mother smile
Not the ghost of a smile that misted her lips
When I did something dad would have done,
But a real smile with an echo
The kind you could kiss.

In Pylos senile King Nestor, dribbling into his cups,
Told incredible stories about shape-shifters
And other metamorphic claptrap,
A hundred years of superstition wrapped up in a purple cloak,
Saying: “Your father is seven feet tall, boy,
With a neck like a bull’s and the mind of a fox,
God-like Odysseus.”
And as he dribbled my father became Achilles
And Ajax, every great hero of whom I’d ever read.
So I gave up the ghost, and left.

I was almost home when a beggar crawled up to me,
Crawled like a snake and snivelled my name:
Telemachos.
And as I edged away, tripping over myself,
He shifted shape
Became a god, all shiny and ripped and there I am
Pissing myself on the side of the road when he says:
“Son? It’s me, I’ve come home at last.”
And the empty wind sang along
No longer a potential bearer of messages in a bottle but
Blown out
As Odysseus stood there on the sand,
Uncertainly extending his hand for a manly shake
And maybe a pat on the back.

I backed away from this hero, this god
Who didn’t yet dare embrace me
(Though he wasted no time with my mother,
Stealing back the bed and hogging the duvet
While she shivered against the headboard).
“What’s wrong,” he asked,
“Don’t you recognise your old dad?”

Who the fuck do you think you are?
I didn’t say,
Barging in here after twenty years
Like you’ve never even been away.
I didn’t tell him about all the other boys
Whose fathers went away, how we played on the sea-shore
Pretending to be our dads
On this single-parent island, Ithaka rich in sheep,
Black sheep
No chips off the old block, with attitude problems and
Daddy issues like you wouldn’t believe.

Or how I watched my mother flirt with a string of not-quite stepfathers
Who ingratiatingly patted my head
“He’s the image of you,” they said.
My mother laughing silently disagreed
Stood by her man, by the loom,
She wove a life for us from the same bare threads
The loom clacking like a stuck clock’s tick
Until Odysseus came back.

Until I said, “Sorry, what was that?”
And he grinned: “You kids, you’d think you had wax in your ears.”
Like he knew anything about it.
And I
I
I
Stuttered like I did when first he left
Along with the bed-wetting and the
Thumb-sucking
And other therapist-friendly ‘abandonment issues’.
I told him about the suitors - how could I not? –
And Odysseus narrowed his fox eyes
Grimly he told me what we’d do to them
The crown-stealing, home-wrecking, mother-fucking
Pigs.
“Think of it as a father-son bonding exercise,” Odysseus said.
I did.

Back we crept across rocky Ithaka
Rich in sheep and broken homes
Until we reached the Hall where the suitors
Squabbled and gambled for my mother’s hand.
My mother.
And I took my bow and arrow and shot him
And him
And him him him
While Odysseus chuckled:
“That’s my boy”
As he lay about him with an axe
And mum unwove the threads for the last time
Until we were back where we started.
And we hung the maids on the clothesline to drip
Dry and later, when dad and mum had pulled the
Purple curtain close around them I took them down
And folded them away in cedar caskets
To be saved for special occasions,
When I could triumphantly unfold them and say
“Look, look what you made me do.”

A story in one part.

2006-07-24T09:25:47Z

It’s like how I can remember the first time my mom hit me. She was making a show of getting ready for work, putting on stockings and a neat white apron and a touch of rouge on her cheeks.

“Why don’t you put your real clothes on?”

“These are my real clothes.”

“No they ain’t. I seen what you got in your bag to put on when you get to work.”

My mom looked at her bag and pretended she hadn’t.

“I don’t know what you’re talkin about, Kirby.”

“Billy Ryder’s mom said you was a whore and if you hadn’t a been a whore then my dad wouldn’t a left.”

There was a pause and I could feel her counting to ten in her head, like the school counsellor said to do if ever I felt mad enough to hurt somebody. I started counting along: seven, eight, nine.

She slapped me. It hurt almost as bad as when I went over the handlebars of my bike, which was a lot. Afterward I waited for her to burst into tears and hug me and say “I’m so sorry. I love you. I’ll never hit you again,” like on an After School Special. But she just turned back to the mirror and started putting her mascara on. The brush made a sucking noise when she pushed it up and down in the tube.

“Bitch,” I said and ran to my room to hide under the covers. I thought she would come find me then but instead she just went out to work like always. When I heard the front door close I got out of bed and went to the mirror. My cheek was red and swollen so I knew I’d have a bruise in the morning, which made me angry and glad at the same time. I wondered what ‘whore’ meant. Billy wouldn’t tell even when I gave him a dead arm. I don’t think he knew either. Then I went to the kitchen and ate a whole bowl of Cheerio’s without milk, even though I wasn’t hungry. At 9:23 I went to bed.

I woke up when she got home. The Mickey Mouse alarm clock by my bed said it was a quarter of four. She didn’t come into my room then, either, but her footsteps stopped outside my door and I listened to her breathing for a long time.

The next time she hit me she couldn’t have counted to more than five, but the time after that she waited so long I forgot what I did to make her mad. That time she must have counted to a whole ten thousand. I could tell it got easier for her each time. Sometimes she looked sad when her hand hit my face, or my arm, or whatever part of me she could reach, especially when her eternity ring cut my lip and I bled all over my shirt. But mostly she looked kind of relieved. Women never forgive you for calling them a whore, even if it’s mostly true.

I’m not real smart but by the time I was in 6th grade I’d found out what a whore is. They used to think I was educationally subnormal, which means retarded, but then I learned to read and write and they decided I was just a slow learner. That’s why I’m only in 6th grade, even though I’m nearly fourteen. It’s not so bad. I was always the smallest in my class, but now I’m the tallest by like a foot, because most of the other kids haven’t even reached puberty yet. But that’s kind of bad anyways, because none of the girls have tits or nothing, and you aren’t supposed to think girls are hot until they’re thirteen. After that they’re anybody’s. That’s what Billy Ryder says anyway. Billy is shorter than me but girls like him because he smiles a lot and he’s not almost retarded. Mostly I hate him, even though he’s my best friend.

There was a new girl in my class. Her name is Plum, like the fruit, and she got held back a year. I asked her if it was because she was retarded, and instead of slapping me or telling me to go suck a fuck, which is the best curse I’ve ever heard, she just looked sad.

“I was sick,” she said. I felt bad then, but not too bad because she was thirteen so I was allowed to think she was hot, which she was, and also she had tits. Not real big ones, like my mom’s, which are plastic anyway, but she definitely had them. I stared at them when she told me she’d been sick, and then I said

“You don’t look sick.”

“Thanks,” she said.

Then I didn’t know what to say, so I went back to puzzling over Pythagoras, which means triangles.

At recess I went and found Billy, who was playing soccer with the kids in his grade – whose grade I should have been in – and I told him about Plum.

“Yeah,” he said, “I know about her. She got held back ‘cause she fucked her dad and got pregnant and she had to have an abortion.”

“Oh man, people don’t fuck their dads! What’s an abortion?”

“It’s when they get, like, a vacuum cleaner and stick it up the girl’s cooch and suck the baby out.”

“That’s gross. You’re lying.”

“How would you know, retard? I bet you don’t even know how babies get made.”

I do. I saw my mom doing it once, on the porch with the guy from next door. I watched them from out of my bedroom window and it made me feel dirty because I knew I shouldn’t be spying, but I couldn’t stop watching and then I forgot it was my mom and Mr Gomez and just kind of stared until they juddered and stopped. She didn’t have a baby, though, because she got her tubes tied after she had me. Because of accidents.

“Anyway, she’s a whore. Probably she’d even do it with you if you asked real nice and kept your mouth shut the whole time.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, whatever.”

One of the 7th graders, Corey McCleod, told Billy to stop talking to me then, so he went away.

Plum didn’t look much like a whore. My mom looked like a whore, because her skirts were always so short you could see her ass and she wore too much makeup and also she worked in a lap-dancing club, which made me mad. But she wouldn’t quit because we needed the money. The Welfare wouldn’t even keep her in cigarettes, she said, which made her laugh, and then she coughed until her mascara ran down her face. Plum wore short skirts too, but she was thirteen so it wasn’t so bad. I kept thinking about what Billy had said. I wanted to do it with a girl. I did it with my hand sometimes, but my mom banged on my bedroom wall and told me to stop chokin the chicken, which was embarrassing, and anyways it made a mess. I decided I would do it with Plum as soon as I got the opportunity.

I was getting smarter. I guess because I already did 6th grade once, so I knew what the work was, which meant I had an advantage over the other kids in my class. I got a B+ on my math test, so my teacher Missis Farrell was pleased with me and I got to choose who I wanted to sit by in study period. I chose Plum and made her happy, because mostly people didn’t want to sit by her, in case bits of dead baby were still in her cooch and fell out on the floor and they accidentally trod in some. Billy Ryder had been telling everybody about the abortion thing.

We were supposed to choose a book we wanted to read and then read it. I chose a book called ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, and even though there weren’t many big words I still didn’t get what was going on, so I decided to talk to Plum instead.

“Does it hurt?”

She looked up from her book, which was ‘I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings’, and said,

“Does what hurt?”

“When they put the vacuum cleaner up your cooch?”

She looked confused for a minute and then she burst into tears. Missis Farrell come and asked what was the matter, and in the end I had to go see the Principal. Plum went to the bathroom to wipe her face, so we walked down the hall together but she was ignoring me.

“I’m sorry I made you cry,” I told her. “I was just curious.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sick of people always spreadin stories about me that ain’t even true and feelin like they got a right to ask me that kinda stuff. It ain’t fair!”

“Ain’t it true?”

But we were outside the bathroom and she went inside before I finished asking my question.

I had to explain to the Principal why Missis Farrell had sent me to her office. The Principal felt bad for me because she knew I wasn’t a bad guy, just slow, so she gave me an after-school detention and let me go back to class. But first she told me I had to learn be more tactful so as not to hurt other people’s feelings.

“What’s tackful?”

“Tactful means not always coming out and saying what you want to say, if you think what you want to say might upset somebody.”

“You mean lyin. I ain’t supposed to lie.”

“Well, generally people shouldn’t. Sometimes, though, a little lie does more good than a big truth.”

Nobody hadn’t ever put it to me like that before.

My mom was out when I got back from detention, and there was a note on the table saying

I got an extra shift I wont be back til late.

Im at work if you need anything. Theres pie in the frij.

Mom xx

By this time she was honest about where she worked because she knew I’d already figured it out. I wondered if her lying about her job when I was a little kid was just being tactful like the Principal had said. It made me feel bad, because if she’d told me the truth that she was just a dancer, I probably wouldn’t have called her a whore, and then she would never have hit me. I guess in the end though she just would have found some other reason.

I ate the pie, which was cherry, and then I rode my bike over to Billy’s house to see if he wanted to go hang out. He wasn’t there, but his mom asked me if I was hungry and I said yes, in case it was tactful, so she gave me a burrito. Billy is a Catholic, which means his mom has like seven kids but their house is real clean, much cleaner than ours. Mrs Ryder feels sorry for me because she thinks my mom is a whore. After I finished my burrito, I asked if she knew where Billy was, and she said “I think he went down to the stream with some of the boys from your class.” I told her she meant Billy’s class, and she looked embarrassed, and then I decided I couldn’t be bothered to ride all the way down to the stream, so I started to cycle home.

On the way I started thinking about doing it with a girl again, and the thinking and the way my dick was kind of smooshed against the bicycle seat made me so distracted I nearly ran into somebody crossing the road.

I yelled “Jeez!” and swerved into the kerb and fell sideways so that my bike was on top of me with my pant leg all tangled in the chain.

“Look where you’re goin, idiot!” said the person I’d nearly run over, and then

“Are you ok?”

“No. I near about died. But I’m ok now.”

I was worried my mom would be mad about the oily rip in my pants. I kicked my bike off of me and sat up. The person I’d nearly run into was Plum.

“Oh,” she said, “It’s you.’

She didn’t sound too friendly.

“Sorry. About in study period, I mean. I’m sorry I made you cry.”

“It’s a’right, I guess. I’m just sick of people askin questions the whole time.”

I stood up and picked my bike out the gutter. It wasn’t too beat up, just a little scratched from where it’d scraped along the kerb.

“Yeah. I won’t ask no more if you don’t want.”

“That’d be good.”

We stood there for a minute and it was sunset, and Plum’s hair looked purple and her face looked a different sort of purple. I could see her tits through her top because she wasn’t wearing a bra.

“Do you wanna go down to the stream? Some guys I know are down there. I think they’re building a dam.”

Actually I knew they were building a dam, because I’d gone with them the last time and they’d said that I was too big to come on it when it was finished, in case I bust it, but I could gather wood for them if I wanted. I’m bigger than most of the 7th graders as well.

Plum nodded. “Okay. But I can’t stay long ‘cause my dad will be lookin for me and he gets mad if I’m late.” There was a red mark on her arm in the shape of a belt buckle.

“It ain’t far.”

I got back on my bike and started cycling, but slow so that Plum could keep up with me walking. It was dusk by the time we got to the stream and the cicadas were chirruping in the long grass. I threw my bike down and called out “Billy! Hey, Billy, you there?”

No one answered, and when I walked down to the stream’s bank where the dam was, I could see no one had been there at all that day, ‘cause there weren’t no footprints in the mud.

“They ain’t here, are they?”

“No,” I answered, “Billy’s mom said they was, but she must a been wrong.”

Plum flopped down in the grass, which was long enough that even when she stood up I could only see the top of her blond head poking out from among the stems.

“It’s like a den in here!”

“What?”

“You could hide all day and wouldn’t nobody be able to find you.” She sounded the same kind of glad I did when my mom left a real obvious bruise. I sat down next to her. I thought about doing it with a girl.

“Do you know what the time is?”

“I ain’t got a watch.”

“I should go. My daddy will be mad at me.”

“Stay a few more minutes.”

“Okay.”

When she said okay, I knew Billy was right about her being a whore. I wanted to ask, just to make sure, but I didn’t think it would be tactful and anyway she’d said no more questions. While I was thinking all this, she took my hand and held it. Her fingers were littler than mine and rough.

“I like you, Kirby,” she said. “I know you didn’t mean to upset me earlier.”

“I didn’t mean to. I’m just not real smart, is all.”

“Well, what’s so great about being smart? Billy Ryder is smart and I hate him.”

“He’s my best friend.”

“He hates you.”

I leaned over and kissed her. She tasted like salt and cherry pie, but not like I thought she would. Not like a plum.

“What are you doing?” she said when I broke away. I didn’t say anything but after a second I kissed her again and she kissed me back. I put my tongue in her mouth and then didn’t know what to do with it, so I just kind of left it there. When mom kissed Mr Gomez they looked like they were chewing each other’s faces. I was getting excited again and I put my hand on Plum’s left tit, which was hard and small. She stiffened up but she kept on kissing me, so I unzipped my pants with my other hands. She heard the zipper go down. “What are you doing?” she said again.

“Nothing.” It was only a little lie.
I pushed my mouth against her face again and then I pushed her by her tit back into the long grass. She was a lot littler than me. I sat up and pulled my underwear down, and she tried to sit up too but I was kneelng on her legs so she couldn’t really move too well. “Kirby, get off me!”

She sounded scared, but I knew she didn’t mean it. Mom used to say “Oh Jorge, stop that!” to Mr Gomez, but it didn’t really mean she wanted him to stop. She just said it to turn him on. It worked on me too, so I pushed her skirt up and tried to get her panties off but they were stuck on her hipbones and wouldn’t come. Plum started to whimper, “Oh stop it Kirby, please don’t,” and I pulled harder and her panties ripped and came away in my hand. So then I pushed her back down in the grass and I made her open her legs with my knee and in everything I was just copying my mom and Mr Gomez, and Kevin, and the mechanic guy and Caleb and the guy from Taco Bell, and then I put my hand over her mouth and I was copying my dad but it took a while to get my dick into her ‘cause she was crying and trying to squeeze her legs together, so I took my hand off her mouth and used it to push my dick inside her and I could hear her sobbing “No daddy please, stop oh please don’t daddy, don’t,” and I didn’t know if she was calling for her daddy or she thought I was her daddy but I kept on pushing into her and then it was like a gun going off.

Plum wasn’t in school the next day, or the day after that. I wasn’t speaking to Billy Ryder because I knew now that he hated me, but I missed his mom more than I missed him. I couldn’t go over to their place anymore in case I ran into Billy. My mom was working a lot, and she had a new boyfriend called Austin like the city, so she didn’t hardly pay any attention to me. She just hit me once for changing the channel on TV when she and Austin was watching Jerry Springer. It wasn’t even a new episode. When Plum hadn’t been in school for a whole week, I asked Missis Farrell where she was. She looked at me funny and after a long time she said,

“Plum is sick again. She won’t be back in school this year.”

And then I was worried, because what if I’d made her pregnant and she’d had to have another baby vacuumed out, and that’s what Missis Farrell meant by sick. But I didn’t have anyone to ask because I wasn’t speaking to Billy Ryder. Soon enough, though, Billy started telling everybody that that was the reason why Plum didn’t come to school no more, so maybe it was true.

I went by her house one day after school and her dad that everyone said had gave her a baby was sitting on the porch smoking a cigarette. He had a black moustache and white hair on his head.

“Is Plum in?” I asked.

“She ain’t receivin visitors.” As he said it, he shifted his weight in the wicker porch chair and scratched his balls.

“But I’m her friend.”

“Son, I told ya, she ain’t seein nobody. Now beat it.”

She must a told him she didn’t want to see me. As I cycled home I figured out why.

The zipper on my pants was stuck. My mom was going to be so mad, what with that and the oil on my leg. Plum was kneeling in the grass straightening her skirt. She was ignoring me again, like on the way to the Principal’s office, even though I thought she wasn’t mad at me anymore.

“I only have five dollars,” I said.

She didn’t say anything.

“I have another seven at home. I could bring them to school tomorrow?”

She finished straightening her skirt, and then she stood up and she looked at me and it seemed like she was counting to ten under her breath. I counted along with her, seven eight nine, and she screamed loud enough to frighten the cicadas:

“I AM NOT A WHORE!”

And she started running away through the long grass, so I could just see the dark shape of her head bobbing above the powdery stalks. By the time I decided to follow her, I couldn’t see her no more.

It’s like when my mom hit me for the first time: women never forgive you for calling them a whore, even if it’s mostly true.

criticism etc appreciated.

imperfect: a story in one part

2005-12-30T10:53:38Z

for blythely

Imperfect

I used to be good at Latin. I liked the poetry of conjugations, the Gregorian chant of a properly learnt declension.

The first verb I learnt was amo. A class full of giggling eleven year olds, amo nautam. That’s dirty, sir. I’m not saying that. He just grinned. All the girls love a sailor, you’ll learn soon enough. Gleeful disgust stroked smiles onto our faces and I sketched a heart at the back of my new exercise book. Amo.

His name was Henry. He was twenty-five when I was eleven, thirty the year I turned sixteen. I knew I was his favourite because I liked his subject and I was quick. There were girls in my class who painted their nails at their desks and didn’t know how to mate an accusative with an infinitive. He wouldn’t pick on me if I put my hand up (“Well, we have to give someone else a chance,” he said), but when Lucy or Bethan or Maddie got the answer wrong again his eyes would meet mine and we’d share a glance. We’re in this together, it said. Fighting the forces of apathy with the power of relative pronouns.

Halfway through fifth year he set up a club on Wednesday lunchtimes for the few of us who knew that ‘dead language’ didn’t have to mean dead boring. I did drama on Wednesdays, on the small upstairs stage that smelled of Wotsits and the drama teacher’s sweat.

“Come on Fridays instead,” he told me.

So I did, clomping down the empty corridor to his classroom in my new suede Kickers, trying to ignore the knot of something akin to fear in my chest. He was sitting at his desk, marking the first years’ homework with a red biro. 1st person plural of amo.

Amamus.

“Hello, Anna.”

“Hi, sir.”

“There’s no need to stand on ceremony. You can call me Henry if you like.”

“Okay, sir. I mean Henry. Whatever.”

Part of me was delighted at this confidence, but it scared me as well. Teachers weren’t supposed to have first names, not even a teacher who let us watch Up Pompeii at the end of term and still talked about his gap year in France. I called him ‘sir’ obstinately, because that way I knew I wasn’t in his thrall.

We read Ovid and Catullus, poems about prostitutes and skull fucking that weren’t on the syllabus. It’s great literature, he said, and if your Latin is good enough to translate it then you’re old enough to read it.

“Yes, sir,” I said, and blushed scarlet at pedicabo ego vos.

We talked as well. He sensed my alienation, not unusual in a teenager who is brighter than most but not as bright as she would like to be, and so we discussed politics, literature and art. At least, he talked and I listened, and agreed with whatever he said.

And I hated looking at him, scared of what I would see reflected in his eyes. Was my infatuation as obvious as I feared? Autistically, my eyes scanned the room, alighting on cupboards and first year projects stapled messily to the walls. I focused on his left temple, his purple tie. His gaze was steady and didn’t leave my face. I couldn’t concentrate, lost my train of thought too easily and ended up stammering like an idiot, cringing when I realised how I sounded.

One lunchtime I said, “Of course I believe in private education. When I have children I’m going to send them to the best school I can afford.”

I was sat cross-legged on the table, twisting my hair round my little finger until it hurt.

“I can’t believe you think that,” he said. “I’m disappointed in you.”

I’d expected some sort of rebuttal but this felt like humiliation. He said, how could he justify teaching in a comprehensive school if he rejected state education for his own children? Wasn’t that hypocrisy of the highest kind? I shrugged and hated him for being right, for the Guardian-coloured words that leapt from his mouth so easily and showed my youthful bigotry for what it was. He wasn’t trying to embarrass me but I wanted his approval, and its absence burnt cold in my belly. A strand of hair snapped. I looked at the ceiling, the door.

“Maybe I’ll change my mind when I’m older.”

I didn’t fancy him. One of the girls in my class accused me of that in fourth year, when I first started finding excuses to stay behind after class, just to talk to him. To prove to myself that he wanted to talk to me. No, I said, don’t be stupid. I didn’t fancy him. That was a child’s word, spoken mockingly and accompanied by oohs of derision. It was intellectual, I told myself, brought on by my desperate happiness at being treated like an adult by someone I admired. I had thought sometimes about what it would be like to kiss him and squirmed, horrified at the thought. It was a physical horror that I had to suppress by clamping my hand over my mouth to ward off his imagined lips. That’s dirty, sir. But I knew that if he did ever try to kiss me, I wouldn’t resist.

I coloured Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays red in my diary. I wore a skirt to class and too much makeup, going for subtle but ending up garish. I didn’t want him to know. No, that’s a lie. I did.

The classroom was freezing; the heating had broken down again. I shivered inside my blazer; numb fingers made my handwriting a messy scribble. When the bell rang, everyone else jumped up, clattered their chairs, stuffed pencil cases and folders into the gaping mouths of their school bags. I kept writing, reluctant to abandon my essay lest I lose my train of thought. He cleared his throat and spoke above the din.

“Complete the exercises on page 63 for homework, I’ll collect them in tomorrow morning. Don’t run, Natalie, you’re not being chased by a mad axe murderer.”

Gradually the classroom emptied. I hunched over my paper and kept writing, even though I could feel his eyes on me. When I shivered, I pretended it was just the cold.

“Enthusiastic, aren’t you?”

“I’m nearly finished, sir.”

“I said you could call me Henry. Come on, I can’t hang around forever.”

“Sorry, sir. Hold on a sec.”

I scrawled a final sentence, the last word taking half a line because my cramped hand kept moving even though there were no letters left to write.

“There, done.”

I stood up and began to chuck stuff into my bag. Static crackled across the back of my blazer. He was standing very close.

“Anna.”

I looked up at him and something spiked inside my stomach, hot and sharp. The backs of my knees met the edge of the desk and I sat down. That made my thighs look fat, so I stood up again and tried not to meet his gaze.
It was no use. He kissed me and I didn’t resist.

It was Thursday.

“I have to go,” he said, “I have to pick the boys up from nursery.”

“Okay,” I said. I fiddled with my ponytail, scrunching it between my fingers like a handful of sand.

“I’ll see you tomorrow lunchtime, all right?”

“Yeah,” I said, “See you.”

My best friend was a year younger than me. Her name was Carly. She came over after school that day with a bag of popcorn and a Disney video. It’s sing-along, she said.

I was distracted, barely answered her, read the same sentence in my geography textbook over and over again.

Monsoons occur annually, and are characterised by a period of a few months’ torrential rainfall, even though the rest of the year may be extremely dry.

“Oi, you,” said Carly. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t lie to me, young lady. What’s wrong?”

“I told you, nothing. Just shut up and put the video on.”

“You’re all flushed and windswept. Like thingy out of Wuthering Heights. Have you been kissing someone? You have, haven’t you? I bet it was Charlie Barrett. He fancies the pants off you.”

“Give me some credit. He’s gross! Anyway, I haven’t been kissing anyone.”

“Yeah, right. Your mum said you were late home from school. Where were you?”

“I had extra Latin.”

“Whatever. I think you’re lying.”

She flounced over to the TV and slid the video into the slot.

“It’s The Little Mermaid. Do you want some popcorn?”

I lost my virginity on a Friday lunchtime, on a desk scratched with graffiti older than I was. The classroom door was locked and the blinds drawn like blackout curtains. I was terrified we’d be caught, but I knew there was nowhere else to go.

“You’re a very special girl, Anna,” he said.

“What about your wife?”

“What about her?”

“Aren’t you going to tell her?”

This time, it was he who wouldn’t meet my eyes. Before afternoon registration I went to the bathroom and tried to wash the blood out of my knickers with hand soap. It didn’t work and I started to cry.

But on Monday, in class, he smiled at me and let me answer when no one else could.

“’Si Aeneas Didonem amavisset, illa vixisset.’ Anna?”

“Um…’If Aeneas had loved Dido, she would have lived’.”

“And that is?”

“An unfulfilled condition?”

“Very good. Now put it into the imperfect.”

“Si Aeneas Didonem amaret, illa viveret.”

We shared a glance. For the first time since Friday, I breathed.

It didn’t seem strange after that first lunchtime. I knew people who were having sex in car parks, public toilets, the botanical gardens. I knew people who were having sex with bank clerks, builders, even junkies. I had sex with my teacher in a freezing classroom; it wasn’t that bad, in comparison. But while some of the other girls boasted about their conquests, about being caught at it by dog walkers or their parents, I kept quiet.

“Anna,” he said at the end of class, “I think you should come for extra Latin lessons after school on Tuesdays.”

Natalie and Bethan complained. “Sir, that’s not fair! Anna’s brilliant at Latin already; how come she gets extra help?”

“Because I want her to sit the AS level at the same time as GCSEs, which are, as you all seem to forget, only six weeks away. I suggest you concentrate on learning the syllabus thoroughly, as there are some people in this class who still seem to think that the first person singular of ‘mentiri’ is ‘mento’. What is it, Bethan?”

“’Mentior’, sir.”

“Very good, Bethan. See, you don’t need extra help at all.”

“Henry?”

“Mmm?”

“What’s going to happen when I go to college?”

“Why don’t we worry about that after your exams? They’re more important at the moment.”

On the last Friday before exam leave we broke up at lunchtime. I went to his classroom as soon as we were dismissed. The door was closed. When I pushed it open a cleaning lady looked up in surprise.

“Are you looking for someone, dear?”

“No,” I said, “I wasn’t looking for anybody. I thought I left my jacket in here, that’s all.”

“I didn’t find any jacket.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I just remembered I didn’t bring it with me today. Sorry.”

I ran straight home, sweating more than I should have been on such a mild day, and did something I’d never done before. I called his house. His wife answered.

“Is Mr Rosen there, please?”

“Hold on a minute. Who’s speaking?”

“It’s Anna. From 5b?”

“I’ll just fetch him for you.”

I heard her call his name, and then muffled words I couldn’t make out. After a pause, he picked up the phone.

“Anna? Why on earth are you ringing me?”

“You weren’t there today.”

“I know.” He was whispering. “Look, this isn’t a good time. Can I phone you back?”

“All right,” I answered, but he’d already hung up.

“Apparently, right, in the original fairy story about the Little Mermaid,” said Carly, “the Mermaid loses her voice so she can grow legs and seduce the Prince, and then he screws her over and marries someone else. So she ends up, like, wandering the earth alone and mute. It’s really depressing.”

“I think I prefer the Disney version,” I said.

I got an A* in Latin GCSE, and a B in my AS level. Three weeks later I started college. On the second day a girl approached me in the canteen.

“Hey,” she said, “didn’t you used to go to Parkstone Girls’?”

“Yes, I just left. My name’s Anna.”

“I thought I recognised you. I’m Sophie. What subjects are you doing?”

“Uh - English, History and Latin.”
Her lip curled. “Latin? You must have had Henry – I mean, Mr Rosen.”

I stared at her. “Yeah. Mr Rosen. Don’t you like him?”

Sophie reached up and twirled a strand of hair between her fingers. “Like him? No, not much. Oh, my friends are waving at me, I should go. Nice to meet you, Anna.”

I watched her walk away.

Almost eight years after I started at Parkstone – eight years of perfects, imperfects and unfulfilled conditions – I came home for the summer after my first year at university. It was late June and sticky-hot. I slouched on the sofa next to my mother, flicking through a magazine and ignoring the local news. Suddenly my mother elbowed me in the ribs.

“Wasn’t that man one of your teachers?”

I looked up and more than three years into the past. Henry’s face, half obscured by a copy of the Guardian, dominated the television screen.

“Shall I turn it up?”

I nodded. As the newsreader’s voice grew louder, I found myself sitting up straighter.

“…Local teacher Henry Rosen, 33, was arrested this morning on a count of statutory rape and of grooming an underage girl for sex. Mr Rosen allegedly entered into a sexual relationship with the girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, when she was just fourteen, under the pretext of giving her extra Latin tuition. Mr Rosen, who is married, declined to comment on the allegations. His wife is standing by him.”

The newsreader paused and then said, much more cheerily, “A balloon festival is to be held in Farnham this weekend. Hot air balloon enthusiasts from all over Europe will gather to…”

I turned the volume down and picked up my magazine. My hands were shaking slightly. Mum’s voice rose in outrage.

“If that’s true – well, what a disgusting man. That is an appalling breach of trust. I’m glad you’re not the sort of girl to allow yourself to be taken advantage of like that.”

I stared at a paparazzi photo of Charlotte Church falling out of a taxi and spoke under my breath.

“What was that, darling?”

“I said I’m glad too, mum.”

American Psycho fic

2005-06-16T02:02:14Z

Yes, I am entirely obsessed and quite possibly mentally disturbed. Yes, I would like you to read this. NC-17, because it's gross. *knows how to sell herself*

1992

My name is Patrick Bateman. I am thirty-one years old. For my thirtieth birthday, which was fourteen months ago, I disembowelled a prostitute named Cindy with the blade from a Gillette razor. While she was still conscious, I ate her liver with Dijon mustard and a garnish of fresh parsley. Evelyn wanted to have dinner at Dorsia, followed by drinks at Espace, but Dorsia ceased to be cool at the end of the last decade. I told Evelyn this firmly when she first raised the issue a number of months before my birthday, but as always she refused to listen.

“Patrick,” she says, “Patrick, what are you doing for your birthday?”

“I’m returning some videotapes.”

“You always say that, you tease! Come on, what do you really want to do?”

She bats playfully at my sleeve and I tug my arm away in annoyance.

“Evelyn, do you mind? That’s Calvin Klein you’re pawing at.”

“Sorry. So what do you want to do?”

“Well, I’d quite like to fuck Madonna up the ass and then watch her choke to death on her own pointy bra. Would that suit you, Evelyn?”

Of course she’s not paying attention.

“Because Marcus Halberstam – you know Marcus – says he can book Dorsia for a private function if we arrange it now, so I thought if we did that then we could invite a lot of people. Dorsia has a lot of tables, Patrick, it would be simply amazing.”

“Whatever.” I’m not concentrating. One of the waitresses is bending over the table opposite us, putting some drinks down, and I’m admiring the way her ass shifts inside the material of her dark blue skirt, which is, I think, a not bad piece by Coco Chanel.

I don’t show up for my party because of my pressing engagement with Cindy. The following Monday at Pearce & Pearce, Van Patten taps me on the shoulder.

“Hey Bateman, that was a great party you threw this weekend. Even if Dorsia is kind of out of fashion now. Evelyn organise it?”

“Uh, yes,” I tell him, distracted.

“I really liked the suit you were wearing. Valentino? Wait, crap, I’m late for a meeting. Catch you later.”

He runs off before I have the chance to tell him I wasn’t at the party at Dorsia. He must have got me confused with Hamilton or Allan or Bateman – wait. I’m Bateman.

--

Five months ago I moved to London, basically because of company business but also because I needed a break. Evelyn came with me. I couldn’t really stop her – we’re married now. It was a low-key affair, comparatively. She wore a tailor-made Dior dress and I slit the reverend’s throat in the vestry after the service.

Now we’re in the Ritz, which would be nice if it weren’t for the German tourists in shell suits littering the place up and making it look as trashy as hell. Evelyn has something to tell me, but I’m too distracted. It’s getting worse, my attention span. Recently I’ve been having spells where I zone out completely and come round maybe half an hour later with no recollection of what I’ve done. I’m worried it will happen when I’m at work one day. My father is already concerned for me; if I had an episode on company time he would have to do something about my frankly unacceptable behaviour.

“So, anyway Patrick,” Evelyn is saying, picking apart a cucumber sandwich with her over-manicured nails, “the gist of it is, I’m pregnant.”

“What?”

“I said, I’m pregnant. Do you understand what that means?”

I shake my head no, but actually I do understand perfectly well what it means. I wonder what a child of me and Evelyn will be like. A well-groomed, vacant psychopath, I imagine. It’s a wonder that I can create life, when it doesn’t seem like there’s anything at all inside me. Sometimes I freak out because I don’t think I can feel my heartbeat. Then again, the child might not even be mine.

“You’re okay with it, then? I mean, Cecilia just had a baby and she said giving birth was the most blissful experience she’d had. They pump you full of drugs and you don’t feel a thing except absolute euphoria. Can you imagine?”

I can try. I treat Evelyn to my best smile.

“I would like to abort our baby by shoving a large knitting needle up your cunt. In fact, I think I would jump on your stomach first, you stupid fucking bitch, because I’m pretty sure you told me you were on the Pill.”

“What’s that?”

“I said, I thought you were on the Pill.”

“Oh. I was – I, I am. It must not have worked, I guess.”

I get the feeling she’s lying, but I can’t summon the energy to call her on it. Just then, I hear a voice belonging to someone I had hoped to avoid for the rest of my life.

“Coo-ee, Patrick!”

Luis Carruthers. Christ. The last time I saw him, he was clinging to my knees in Bloomingdale’s and snivelling like the pathetic faggot he is. I make to ignore him, but Evelyn turns round and greets him loudly enough that I can’t pretend not to have seen him. He’s wearing a stylish, if somewhat too flamboyant, green Yves St Laurent suit with wide lapels and no shoulder pads.

“Hello, Luis, whatever are you doing in England?”

Luis bows faggily to Evelyn and kisses her hand.

“Oh, you know, this and that. I broke up with Courtney, did you hear?”

Evelyn makes her aghast face.

“I didn’t know. How dreadful! Well, I guess we all have news to share. It’s a little early to be telling anyone, but I suppose you can know – Patrick and I are having a baby.”

There’s a moment of silence, in which the waiter brings a fresh tray of sandwiches. Shreds of cucumber decorate Evelyn’s plate like droplets of green blood on linoleum. Finally Luis kicks into action.

“A baby? Oh that’s wonderful! Patrick, you must be very proud.”

He looks at me with wide wet eyes and I feel suddenly sick, even though I really haven’t eaten that much.

“Would you excuse me? I have to use the bathroom.”

I stand up and push my way blindly through the throng of badly dressed, overweight tourists. None of them are as rich or attractive as me, and even through my nausea I manage to be thankful that I’m not one of them.

--

After I use one of the cubicles (which looks good for doing coke in, although I don’t have any coke and I haven’t really used it since I came to Britain, because it seems to be the favoured drug of television actors, who are all fags with bad teeth), I turn on all the cold taps and lurch from one sink to the next, throwing handfuls of water on myself. Some goes down my front and makes me look like I’ve pissed myself. I’ve just stuck my head under a tap and am sucking on it as thought it were a tit when the bathroom door swings open and Luis walks in.

“Patrick? What are you doing? You know they sell Evian here, right?”

He giggles at his pathetic joke. I surface and gasp at him, “Fuck off, Carruthers.”

He looks hurt.

“Patrick. It’s been three years. Aren’t you even a little bit pleased to see me?”

“No.” I tell him, “I never want to see you again. You can rot in hell for all I care.”

“Pat-rick,” he singsongs, moving towards me, “There’s no need to be so aggressive. I’m pleased to see you.”

Breaking up with Courtney seems to have made him more forward, the bastard.

“Luis,” I say patiently, “don’t touch me.”

He runs his hand along my collarbone, coquettishly, but his touch is firmer than it was the last time this happened. God, I have got to stop ending up alone with Carruthers. His fingertips trace a path down my bicep, then they slide across and he’s drawing patterns on my $500 herringbone Gucci shirt.

“Jesus, Carruthers,” I say.

“What, you like that?” he says in a faggy lisp that makes me want to cut out his tongue and feed it to him.

“No,” I reply.

“I can’t believe you and Evelyn are having a baby! You’re going to be a father, Patrick.” and as he says ‘father’ his hand moves even lower and he squeezes, Jesus I can’t believe I didn’t see this coming, he squeezes my cock through the linen of my lightweight Versace pants.

I zone out.

--

I come round to find myself in one of the ornate toilet cubicles. Luis is kneeling on the salmon coloured bathroom floor, sucking my cock. He’s making disgusting slurping noises like a kid sucking on a popsicle and I come very close to vomiting. But I don’t vomit, instead I come in his mouth and he swallows it with a little grunt of pleasure or surprise, blinking up at me with his watery blue eyes.

I pull my cock out of his mouth and do up my pants quickly, before he has a chance to react.

“Stand up” I tell him, and he gets to his feet adoringly. I could probably tell him to cut his own throat right now and he’d obey me. When he’s standing I kneel down in front of him, thankful for the relatively clean floor because linen is one of the harder materials to get thoroughly clean, particularly as it doesn’t respond well to harsh detergent. He’s already hard and almost whimpering with desire when I unzip his pants and take his small pale cock in my left hand. As I do this, I’m reaching into my jacket pocket with my right hand and I pull out my switch knife. Carruthers doesn’t see me do this because he’s staring at the chandelier on the ceiling and making small sighing noises.

“Oh,” he starts to say, “I always knew you wanted me too. It’s all right, Patrick, don’t be –“

I interrupt him rudely by bringing the knife’s blade down sharply on his cock, half severing it. Luis doesn’t scream because he’s in shock, which is what is I had banked on when I decided to do this. Blood spurts out and spatters my horn-rimmed Oliver Peoples glasses and, probably, my Gucci shirtfront.

He passes out from the pain and I cut his jugular as neatly as I can in the circumstances. After I’ve washed my face and sponged my shirt off as much as possible (I have to button my jacket up to hide the stains, and it looks kind of dorky but I don’t have any choice), I leave Luis bleeding to death in the cubicle farthest from the door, so that the pooling blood will take a long time to seep into the Baroque tearoom and upset the ornamental cherubs.

Evelyn is bored.

“Jesus, Patrick, where have you been? Some Japanese are eyeing up our table.”

“Sorry,” I tell her, “I was taking a crap.”

“That’s so lovely. Thank you for sharing.”

“You did ask. Come on; let’s get out of here. These tourists are driving me crazy.”

Evelyn gets to her feet and rests one hand lightly on her stomach.

“We’ll all leave,” she says. “You and me and Patrick Bateman the Second.”

“Excellent,” I mutter as I pay the check. “I just can’t wait until little Patrick Junior comes along.”

The doorman bows to us and holds the door wide open, and we step out into the sunshine on Piccadilly.

draco/(eminem) part 7

2005-06-06T23:59:53Z

just over a thousand words and almost a week overdue.

They fly to LAX the following morning. Marshall rides on the wing of the plane (he doesn’t need to. He’s bound to Draco, he says, so wherever Draco goes, Marshall would end up too. Death is like a spell, he says, but Draco knows he doesn’t really understand what a spell is). They hit a patch of turbulence somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, and Marshall presses his face against the outside of the window and leers in at the passengers. None of them seem to notice, but Ramone shivers and sinks further into his oversized sweater.

Then everything is a mess of airports and limousines and another hotel room, every nerve in Draco’s body screaming with jetlag and foreignness. Marshall finds a stack of CDs in his suitcase and plays Frisbee with one until Draco relents and puts it on. More rap music, he’s on overload and god he’d kill for some soothing Bach or even Tchaikovsky.

He tells Marshall this. Marshall is suitably unimpressed.

“Your taste in music fuckin’ sucks, man. Like, yo, Elton John? What the fuck is wrong wit’ you?”

Draco is too tired to argue. And besides, he really does like Elton John.

“Shut up. I’m going to sleep. Can you turn the music off, please?”

Marshall grumbles but does as he’s told, and Draco falls asleep to the imaginary strains of “Hold Me Closer, Harry Potter” drifting through his head.

He wakes up feeling vaguely nauseated.

--

Harry flies Economy Class to LA, and ends up sitting next to a man with worse body odour than Dudley. Hermione drove him to the airport wreathed in smiles, the lease to Harry’s new flat safely in the glove compartment.

“Have fun, Harry!” she said as she hugged him goodbye.

“Uh,” said Harry eloquently.

--

Elton John’s glasses are not nearly ostentatious enough for Draco’s tastes. He was expecting hearts and glitter, at the very least.

“So, Marshall,” Elton greets him. It takes Draco a few seconds before he realises Elton is talking to him. The real Marshall, ghost Marshall, is sitting moodily at the front of the stage. Every so often he casts disparaging looks in Draco’s direction.

“ – Really an honour to be working with you.”

“Um, thank you,” Draco manages to respond, wondering if ‘Mr John’ is a proper form of address, or if he should just go with ‘Sir Elton’.

“LA is beautiful at this time of year. What do you think of the city, Marshall?”

Draco considers this. “It’s okay. Violent, though. I mean, it’s like one shot, two shots, all I hear is gun shots, you know?”

Marshall’s head spins round (literally, like the girl in that Muggle film Draco saw once, which gave him nightmares for three weeks and forced him to sleep in Zabini’s bed for reassurance), and he makes frantic writing motions.

“Yo, dog, I like that. Write it down, man.”

“I don’t have a pen!”

Sir Elton looks bemused. “I beg your pardon?”

“Um, I was talking to myself.” Draco winces inwardly. Way to make a good impression.

“Not to worry. So, are we ready to start rehearsing?”

Enormous bollocks. Draco smiles brightly. “Sure thing!”

--

American wizards don’t really know who The Boy Who Lived is, which makes a nice change. On hearing Harry’s “cute British accent”, the girl on the till in McDonalds asked him if he knew Robbie Williams, which he rather sadly denied. Other than that, he finds himself completely anonymous, and also in danger of being mugged several times.

Harry meanders down a street, ignoring the crowds of people who have to jump out of his way, and ends up standing in front of a neon-decorated club with a menacing bouncer on the door.

“ID?” he snarls. He must be wearing at least twelve gold rings.

“Oh, I’m not coming in,” Harry doesn’t say. After all, it isn’t like he has much else to do. His lack of Muggle identification could be a problem, but he’s all right at Transfiguration and a speedy bit of work with a London bus ticket does well enough to fool the bouncer. McGonagall would be proud.

Inside, the club is foggy with dry ice. It reeks of sweat and spilled beer. Harry buys himself a drink with an umbrella in it and squints through the smoke at the tables snaking round the edge of the room. A Mexican girl dances by herself in the middle of the floor, not quite in time with the bass beat that thunders from the speakers. The tables are nearly all occupied, and none of the occupants look like they’d care for company. In the corner, a couple are practically having sex, like get a room, as Ron would say. Would have said. At the next table, a very thin man is talking animatedly on a mobile phone, gesticulating wildly as though whoever he’s speaking to can see him. And on the next table, there are two bored-looking fat men and – Harry drops his glass. The paper umbrella somersaults gracefully through the air and lands point down between his feet.

--

Marshall disappears halfway through the afternoon rehearsal, claiming he’s going to puke and ectoplasmic vomit ain’t the kind of stain a spray of Shout gets rid of. He isn’t there that evening when Jermaine and Big-D drag Draco out to a club “’Cause you actin’ crazy man, you need to chill out some,”, although Draco’s pretty sure he hears sniggering from under the bed at that point.

Clubbing has never been Draco’s thing, really. Perhaps there are advantages to the sleazy anonymity of a nightclub, but he doesn’t need the cover of darkness to get laid and he’s pretty sure Marshall doesn’t have too many problems in that area either. Draco slouches at a table with Marshall’s red Nike Air hat pulled low over his eyes and pretends to be too drunk to make conversation. Ramone is making more phone calls (that bloody telephone is glued to his ear, honestly) and Jermaine and Big-D are more or less ignoring him.

There are some fit girls here, as far as Draco can tell through the dry ice and cigarette fog, and he toys with the idea of calling one of them over, just for the hell of it. If he’s going to be mistaken for a rap superstar, he should take advantage of the benefits that confers, right? His eyes flit over the girl dancing on her own and clearly on some sort of drugs, and fall on. Oh, shit.

“Potter!”

The word comes out of Draco’s mouth before he can stop himself. Potter is blinking incredulously at him through his stupid round glasses. Big-D turns and gives Draco a funny look.

“Yo, Em, you know that dog?”

Draco clutches desperately at straws.

“We’re, um. We’re from the same hood?”

“No you ain’t. I grew up on Eight Mile same as you, motherfucker, and I ain’t never seen his ass before now.”

Before Draco has a chance to think up some explanation, a shadow falls over his face. He pushes the peak of his cap back and tries to glare at Potter, who looks like he might fall over at any second. Then he does his best Marshall impression.

“Yo, ‘sup?”

Potter gives him a this-is-messed-up-and-I-think-somebody-spiked-my-drink look. He opens his big fat mouth. There’s a pregnant pause, and then he says:

“Malfoy?”

Too late, Draco realises the advantages of never saying anything again ever. Damn.

draco/(eminem) part 6

2005-06-01T22:06:54Z

messed up.

Valentine’s Day, 2001.

“Harry.”

“Uh.”

“Harry! Are you going flat hunting today?”

“Uh.”

Hermione unwraps the towel from round her head and shakes her damp hair out.

“Are you even listening to me? Look, you know I don’t mind you staying here, but it’s been three and a half months and you really ought to think about getting your own place. Harry? Harry, pay attention when I’m talking to you!”

Harry’s gaze remains glued to MTV. Hermione’s hands clench into involuntary fists and she reminds herself of the importance of low blood pressure.

“Turn that bloody thing off, for goodness’ sake.”

Hermione makes a grab for the remote and flips the television onto standby. Harry yowls in outrage.

“Hermione! I was watching that!”

“And now you’re not. What was it anyway?”

Harry shrugs. “Turn it back on and see.”

“Oh, I’m not falling for that. We need to talk about you moving out, remember?”

“No. Can you turn the TV back on, please?”

“You’re such a child, honestly.” She puts the remote down on the coffee table and takes a comb from her dressing gown pocket. Seeing a window of opportunity, Harry lunges for the remote control and flips the TV back on triumphantly.

“ - don’t wanna fuck wit’ me; bitches too, you ain’t nothin’ but a slut to me!”

“Oh dear god. Are you listening to Eminem?”

“Yeah. What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. Apart from, maybe, the fact that he’s a misogynistic, homophobic criminal? I won’t tolerate that kind of thing in my flat, thank you very much.”

“No he’s not. He’s really cool. Listen, listen to this song, it’s really cool.”

Harry returns his attention to the screen. Hermione follows his gaze, a look of distaste on her freshly scrubbed face.

“Harry?”

“Uh.”

“He looks a lot like Draco.”

“No he doesn’t. And stop talking about Malfoy.”

“Yes, he does. Look, his nose is identical. I never noticed that before.”

“Maybe you weren’t looking properly. Anyway, he doesn’t. Go to work.”

Hermione sighs. If he weren’t her best friend, she’d throttle him, she really would.

--

Marshall hasn’t been around a lot over the last few days. When he does show up, he looks more transparent, sort of wispy around the edges. Possessing someone, he explained to Draco, takes a lot out of you. Draco tells him about Voldemort and the time in first year when he possessed Professor Quirrell, and as much about the war as he cares to remember. He tries not to mention Potter. Marshall says “shit!” a lot and refuses to talk much about his own life.

“That shit over now, dog, you know what I’m saying?”

He doesn’t ever discuss his daughter, but on Valentine’s Day Draco wakes up with the hotel telephone in his hand, and his throat feels hoarse and overused. An American operator’s voice comes angrily from the receiver. Draco puts the phone back in its cradle and doesn’t bother mentioning it to Marshall.

That afternoon, Ramone comes into the hotel room in a state of some excitement.

“Hey, dog, good news!”

“What’s that?” Draco speaks as little as possible to the group of people who accompany him everywhere, and they’ve started to back off a little bit.

“They used to it, yo,” said Marshall when Draco asked him if his friends thought he was behaving strangely. “They know to give me my space sometimes.” Mostly, Draco has been left to his own devices, and even though he has no desire to mix with Marshall’s crew, he feels a little weird when he hears music and raucous laughter coming from the other rooms on the hotel corridor.

Now, Ramone is waving a piece of paper in the air and trying not to stare at the frost on the inside of the window and the icicles hanging from the ceiling. Draco doesn’t notice them any more, apart from as an indication of Marshall’s presence.

“You know you been nominated for a bunch-a shit at the Grammys, a’ight? Well I jus’ spoke to Paul and he says they want you to perform some of yo’ shit, dog. He said something about a duet or some shit like that. What you think?”

Draco frowns. Marshall’s tour finished in Glasgow two nights ago, and he’s been meaning to ask when Marshall is planning to ‘die’, thereby freeing Draco from this frankly crazy situation. He’ll ask once Ramone’s gone. Or maybe he’ll leave it until tomorrow.

“I dunno, Ramone. Who do they want me to duet with? Um, yo.”

“Up to you, dog. You don’t think the Grammys is selling out or nothin’?”

Marshall drops through the ceiling and falls into Ramone, who shivers. His head emerges from Ramone’s left knee.

“Psst, Draco. Say no, dog! The Grammys is for Christina fuckin’ Aguilera and them bitches. I ain’t doin’ it!”

No, thinks Draco, you won’t be. I will. He looks Ramone in the eye.

“Sounds good. Tell them yes.”

“Whatever you say, Em. You got any ideas for a duet?”

Marshall floats angrily over to Draco, insofar as it’s possible to float angrily, and snarls “You’re a fuckin’ faggot, dude.”

Draco smiles. “Is Elton John available?”

Marshall’s howls of rage cause an icicle to break off and skewer a bag of Cheetos to the dresser. Ramone pretends not to notice.

--

Harry is still watching MTV when Hermione gets home from work. She rolls her eyes and takes a stash of estate agents’ leaflets from her bag.

“Guess what I saw in the Evening Standard, Harry?”

“Whu’?”

“Eminem’s performing at the Grammys.”

Harry turns round so fast his glasses fly off and land on the other end of the sofa.

“Really? Brilliant! We can watch it together if you like! When are they?”

“Next week. Here, I got you some estate agents’ listings – Muggle and wizarding. The wizarding ones are cheaper but the Muggle places tend to have central heating, which isn’t something you should overlook. I thought you could go through them tonight.”

“Boring. Chudley Cannons are playing tonight, anyway. Neville and I are going. I promised Ron I wouldn’t ever miss a match if I could help it.”

“Tomorrow, then.”

“Maybe.”

“Harry!”

“What? I can’t be bothered.”

“If you find a place to live by this weekend, I’ll buy you a ticket to the Grammys’ aftershow party.”

“I hear Brixton has a thriving young wizarding community.”

--

Marshall isn’t speaking to Draco. That’s okay, though, because Draco is ignoring Marshall.

The icicles on the ceiling are starting to melt. Draco is warm enough to remove a whole sweater. Instead, he keeps it on and turns the air-con up full blast. Then he listens to Public Enemy until his ears ring and he’s forced to admit to himself that maybe this whole rap thing isn’t as artistically void as he’d decided. In the afternoon he watches Sky News broadcasts about George Bush’s programme of tax reforms and wonders if Potter is upset that he, Draco, is dead. Probably not. He’s probably still celebrating.

Elton John’s PA calls Ramone and arranges a rehearsal in LA for February 18th. Draco gets the feeling that Marshall isn’t going to help him out at this particular performance; a feeling that is reinforced by the way the toothpaste attacks him whenever he walks into the bathroom.

Draco considers faking his (sorry, Marshall’s) death and letting everybody else deal with the consequences, but he doesn’t want to let Marshall down. It’s an unfamiliar emotion, which he thinks maybe might be called loyalty but prefers to refer to as “being a stupid bastard”. Besides, he could do without spending the rest of his life covered in Colgate Whitening. Instead, he plays the song that Elton’s PA and Paul Rosenberg decided should be performed until he knows the lyrics off by heart.

“ – write you but you still ain’t phoning. Calling. Calling? Crap.”

Draco glares at the CD player until the track skips nervously back to the beginning.

“ – left my pager, my – what’s a pager? This is bloody hopeless. English aristocrats should not try to imitate American rappers. It just isn’t healthy.”

The CD scritches sympathetically.

“ – signed an autograph for – fucking bollocks. Elton is going to laugh in my face and then hex me into next August.”

A cobweb of frost spins itself over the mirror.

“ – we should be - this is pathetic
and my hair looks like I cut it
with a chainsaw, like a ferret
gnawed it off, and, God, I
might as well just end it
all this second –”

Draco pauses. What did he just say? He tries again.

“Um, Potter is a pervert and I saw him in the paper
with his girlfriend, name of Granger, and
he acts just like a stranger when he sees me in the street,
even though we work together. Um, I – ”

A ghostly fist punches him hard in the shoulder.

“Yo, bitch, you doin’ good.”

“Marshall?”

“’Sup?”

“You punched me quite hard and, um, your hand is sort of in my lung.”

"Shit, dog, I'm sorry."

Draco wheezes. "Don't worry about it. It's fine."

[part seven]