Freak and the Idol

Katy Jones

Description

Set in a youthful world of city bars and student digs, this quirky debut novel is a postmodern fable which explores issues of image, subjectivity and identity.

Informations

• Publié par: Circaidy Gregory
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 0001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781906451424
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Freak
and the Idol
by Katy Jones
Circaidy Gregory Press


To
Mum, Dad, Bert, Em and Ned,
Anna, my feminist ally
and of course Mike,
whose love never fails.
and
With grateful thanks to Kay for her enthusiastic support, Paul for his help with the first draft and everyone who said, ‘keep writing,’ or ‘keep trying.’ It made a difference!


Contents Opening Falling Retreating Emerging Connecting Detaching Beginning


Chapter 1
Opening
Her molten hair ripples down her back, flickers around her face, licks at the white curves of her shoulders. Her eyes are adamantine, sapphire-bright.
Callum makes a conciliatory noise. He touches a fierce, stray strand of her hair, but snatches his hand back in mid-caress as if singed. Her ruthless eyes forbid it.
Her dress is blood red and should, but does not, clash with the violent shade of her hair; some witchy chromatic bargain. The velvet clings to her static body, ending abruptly half way down her taut and slender thighs.
Callum lifts his eyes, but finds himself unable to meet hers.
‘What do you want me to say?’ he asks.
Her legs are stretched to their full, extraordinary length, crossed at the ankles where thin red straps bind her shoes in place. The heels culminate in cruel spikes.
‘Angel,’ Callum begins again, and the word is dissonant in the darkened room, ‘Can’t we just forget this? The point is, nothing happened, did it?’
Her sudden movement startles him and his gaze clashes with her stare. Something is seething in her eyes.
‘Can’t you understand, Callum?’ she says, her voice wild. ‘Can’t you understand that you’re mine, you’re mine!’ He can hear a note of threat in her voice. ‘I don’t expect you to act like you did tonight!’
Now the perfect white of her face is broken by a dark flush on each cheek. She leans forward, her lips shining a gory red. Callum struggles to think clearly. He is writhing within a cage of her creation.
‘Just listen,’ says Callum, his voice strenuously calm. ‘Nothing has happened. And you have no right to be yelling at me what you do and don’t expect … ’
She stands abruptly, crushing the broken end of his sentence beneath her vicious heels. Seizing her handbag with red-painted claws, she walks across the room. Callum rises quickly and makes a clumsy attempt to intercept her at the door. Her eyes glow with predatory malevolence.
‘I’ll show myself out,’ she spits.
Chris wanders into the kitchen with a contemplative expression on his face and a pair of tartan slippers on his feet. He sits and pushes two days’ worth of breakfast things to the side of the kitchen table in order, presumably, to make room for the elbow he now places upon it.
‘It all hinges on the issue of industrialization,’ he muses, sounding less than convinced. ‘Industrialization and its effect on … religious belief among the working class. Loosely speaking.’ He frowns. ‘Loosely speaking,’ he repeats. ‘Of course, one might on the other hand argue … ’
A sudden ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ interrupts Chris’s line of reasoning and he jumps.
‘Bloody thing.’ He reaches across to the top of the fridge, where his housemate’s alarm clock is still crowing raucously. He grabs it by the plastic rooster, and jabs at a button, which seems to have no effect. He jabs another, and the clock announces, in what Chris feels to be unnecessarily upbeat tones, ‘It’s five-o-clock precisely!’
‘It isn’t,’ says Chris, and returns the clock to its original position. It is a mystery to Chris why Callum’s alarm clock apparently now lives in the kitchen; it is a mystery why Callum does not put it forward an hour so that it tells the correct time; and it is a mystery why it has been set to go off at this hour of the evening.
At this moment, Callum himself makes an appearance, possibly, Chris hypothesizes, for some reason connected with the otherwise unaccountable alarm. He doesn’t get far into the room, however, before he stops dead and stares at Chris’s feet. ‘New slippers.’
‘Like ’em?’
‘No.’
Callum crosses the room and opens a cupboard. ‘No coffee,’ he announces. He slams the cupboard door. ‘Working?’
‘Essay.’
‘Hmn,’ says Callum, and retreats upstairs.
Chris rises abruptly, kicking the table leg and posing considerable threat to the crockery, now balanced precariously near the table’s edge. He begins to pace the room – although it is a small room, and Chris is fairly large – so that he can only take three steps in either direction. Even then his progress is considerably incon­venienced by the position of the table.
‘Damn,’ he says with emphasis. He comes to a halt by the fridge and takes out a bottle of milk. He rinses a mug adorned with Disney characters under the tap, fills it with milk and sticks it in the microwave. As the milk heats, Chris pokes around among a number of empty beer cans, eventually locating a tin of hot chocolate powder. The microwave beeps, and simultaneously the doorbell rings. Chris is temporarily torn between his hot chocolate and the front door, but he reasons with himself that the microwave will switch itself off, whereas the front door will not answer itself … and Callum is almost equally unlikely to.
When Chris opens the front door he finds Shona on the doorstep. Her big, baby-blue eyes momentarily arrest the workings of his mind, but this is usual, and Chris swiftly recovers an appearance of equanimity.
‘Callum’s upstairs,’ he says, and calls, ‘Callum!’ There is no response, so Chris tries again. ‘Callum! He was here.’
Chris accidentally catches Shona’s eye again, and the effect this time is more than usually severe, because it seems to Chris, although their eyes meet only for a second, that Shona’s are almost overflowing with tears.
‘Um, he might’ve gone to buy coffee,’ says Chris, semi-audibly. With an effort, he forces his mind to reactivate. ‘Come in. I was just making hot chocolate. Want some?’
She nods, mutely. Chris leads the way to the kitchen, feeling rather helpless and wondering, with a degree of desperation, how long Callum is going to be. Surely not long? Surely not longer than it would take to make a couple of mugs of hot chocolate? A thought strikes Chris, and he takes a surreptitious look in the fridge. Only a drain of milk. Oh well.
‘Is it low calorie?’ Shona asks, suddenly.
A third time Chris makes the mistake of looking directly at her. She looks guilelessly back out of round, limpid eyes. No sign of tears any more. For a single mad moment Chris gazes into pellucid blue and marvels that anyone can seriously have eyelashes that long, that … luxuriant. I really am losing it , Chris thinks to himself, and snatches his eyes away from her face. But there is another problem he hasn’t yet considered: Shona has perched on a high stool which displays her lovely legs to alarming advantage … when he notices this, Chris’s brain lurches dangerously.
‘Low calorie?’ Chris hears a voice say. After a second it occurs to him that it must have been his own. ‘The hot chocolate? I wouldn’t have thought so.’
‘Never mind.’ She smiles a fragile smile. She is fingering the rim of lace which runs around the v-shaped neckline of her clingy little forget-me-not blue top.
Chris ponders whether this means ‘never mind about the calories’, or ‘never mind about the hot chocolate, I’ll do without.’ By the time he’s finished stirring the chocolate powder into the hot milk he still hasn’t decided, so he offers it to her, and she accepts it, smiling like a little girl on her birthday. She is looking rather little girly today, in fact. The soft, reddish curls of her hair are drawn into bunches. A couple of rebellious ringlets have escaped, and sometimes fall in front of her eyes. Chris almost expects her to put one of these loose strands in her mouth and suck it, the way his youngest sister used to do when she first started school.
Well, he’s made the chocolate and Callum still isn’t back. Chris supposes this means he’s going to have to try and make conversation. He chooses a seat which means he isn’t directly facing her, and tries not to notice that she is swinging her feet back and forth. She nearly always wears a short skirt to the office. Chris wishes she wouldn’t.
‘How was work, today?’ Chris begins, after a long debate with himself about what is the safest and most appropriate topic.
Shona looks at him blankly a moment, then shrugs. ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Pretty boring, actually.’
Chris waits, but it seems that no other information is going to be forthcoming. He is just trying to assemble another sensible-sounding sentence in his mind when fortunately he hears a key in the door.
‘Ah, that’ll be Callum,’ says Chris, superfluously.
Callum enters the kitchen, bearing a plastic bag which suggests that Chris’s surmise about his whereabouts had been correct.
‘Well, you look very cosy,’ Callum says jovially to Shona, and she does, cradling the warm mug in her hands. She looks up at him sulkily, through mutinous coppery tendrils. There is something more than usually alluring about her pinkly petulant lips.
‘No, there isn’t,’ says Shona, tetchily.
‘Sorry?’ Callum looks confused. ‘Do you want to come upstairs? Or do you want coffee?’
Shona glowers at him, and her carefully glossed lips catch the light. The childish roundness of her cheeks is strangely pathetic, and her eyes have changed to a moody navy. There is something beseeching in this sudden and capricious sullenness that begs for love, that implores to be kissed.
‘Shut up!’ snaps Shona. ‘It isn’t true.’
‘Shona, what are you talking about?’ asks Callum, concerned. He smoothes her hair tenderly out of her eyes.
‘Where have you been, anyway?’ Shona asks, pettishly.
‘Buying coffee. I’m sorry, love, but I thought you’d want some.’ Callum takes her hand, gently. ‘Come on, let’s go upstairs.’
When Callum sticks his head around the living room door Chris is watching