...more

He awoke. Well, he emerged suddenly. He sprung through and burst out. He surged meteorically from a blackout, or, at the very least, a patch-out, in mid-sentence, and completely unaware of the subject he had been plodding inanely through a mere second beforehand. It was as if some internal earplugs had been popped from his ears, and an impervious film had been peeled from his eyes, so that he was suddenly, just at that precise moment, able to hear his spoken words for the first time, and see this Polaroid moment; like a deaf and blind man whose hearing and sight had returned in an instant, following a swift and divinely fortunate blow to the temple.

His ears and eyes were opened to the fractured reality of an urban Sunday morning. He heard himself finish his sentence but knew nothing of what he had said. In an effort to bridge this uncertain moment to a hopefully more stable future state of being, he rolled her closer and kissed her forehead. He hoped that his situation would reveal its full self during this stage-managed moment of intimacy. It did not, and he held her close too long for the moment to be passed off as genuine.

The room around him came into focus as she asked for her mobile phone. 'Where is it?' he asked.

‘Side of the bed. In my bag.’

The room was vaguely recognisable. That is to say, it pretty much looked like any other spare room he had ever found himself in with a girl he barely knew. It was definitely a spare room. It was not her room. There was nothing to it but blandness. There were no personal artefacts, no evidence of anybody living here, other than a cocktail of clothes on the floor and their two bodies. This was a room for the discarded, a vacant space for the weary visitor, it was a last minute manger for the promiscuous, enough to be thankful for but not enough to welcome you to stay on another night.

Name please? he thought. Actually, no! Let’s not prolong this. He reached for her handbag on the chair by the empty dresser. The room was familiar though, in specific ways, rather than in its sterile but dusty grimness; it wasn’t just the emptiness synonymous with any spare room. It was the shape, the size, the lie of the sparse furnishing, the small stretch of carpet he could see through the gap in the door left ajar. It was the glimpse of red brick he caught through the slightest divide in the curtains, and the skyline that dripped over it. As he sat up in the bed, shimmering reflections in the mid-distant windows teased and hinted through a wider opening towards the top of the curtains.

‘This?’

‘Yeah. That’s it.’ He handed over the tiny, fake-leather handbag and realising he was naked, and that she was merely half-naked, he looked around for something he could wear. ‘Thanks,’ she said.

‘You know where any of my clothes are?’ he ventured, with a per-chance manner.

‘Shirt’s here.’ She held up her left hand. ‘And boxers are somewhere down here,’ as she reached down under the grubby duvet. Stuart sat on the side of the bed, slipped his boxers over his ankles, up his legs, whipped them up over his buttocks, and stood up to put on his shirt.

Something was pressing on his mind, it may even have been the weight of such a burden that woke him. There was something he felt totally sure he ought to be doing. There was a pervading sense of urgency, a sense that he should have prepared in some manner for whatever it was that he had forgotten to do, but this nameless girl lay before of him, buffering the needling sense of unspecified duty. He just could not force a memory from the flotsam of his drink-soaked mind with regard to what that single pressing engagement might be.

With that, he climbed back into the bed in his boxer’s, with his shirt on but unbuttoned, and his bemusement displayed in every awkward contortion and inept facial expression. The nameless girl looked unimpressed, and fingered the key pad of her phone furiously, sending out an SOS maybe, as Stuart wriggled in beside her on the single bed. Once finished with her text for help, she dialled a three digit number and put the phone to her ear. Stuart lay there like a spare telephone, as she listened.