Short Story: Flash

Short Story: Flash

They sit either side of a low oak table that was not there the last time she visited. She wants to ask if he or his friends had stolen it, but it seems unimportant and she doesn’t want him to judge her on this reaction.

She’s been coming to his flat after school for nine days. She has learnt his name is Jeremy, he is in catering college. He lives with a man in his thirties, a tubby man who snorts long lines of white powder off an ACDC vinyl.

“I thought that stuff was supposed to make you lose weight,” she said to the tubby man on her second visit and immediately regretted it as she watched him stand and leave the room, as if oblivious of her presence.

Today the tubby man is nowhere in sight but she’s still nervous, tugging at her skirt which always seems too long at school and too short round Jeremy’s. Her trainers are scuffed and there’s a bruise on her right knee from playing rounders. She takes all these things in and wonders if Jeremy will notice any of them and if he does, will he care?

Jeremy is rolling a joint and squinting at the afternoon sun. The girl sits with her back to the window, her features obscured, the fuzz of her hair lit up like a halo. How old is she anyway? Fourteen, fifteen? He can’t tell. Young enough not to look sexy in a uniform, he thinks. And why does she keep coming round? Sam, his flatmate says he should just sleep with her. Late at night they laugh about it, Jeremy, who made his way through all the first year waitresses by October, who could be dating a Legal Secretary if she wasn’t such a bitch, falling for a girl five years his junior, a girl who thinks Rachmaninov is a village in Eastern Europe.

They smoke the joint without speaking and he picks at a bit of cellotape or a price label stuck to the bottom of his trainers. He wonders when she will leave, whether he should just ask her to go or wait till she gets bored.

She never seems to get bored though and when he’s in a good mood Jeremy can see how this could be endearing, like a lost dog that needs a new owner and doesn’t understand it’s not allowed inside in case it craps on the floor. Most of the time, like now, he just wants her to go.

They met about a week ago, when she came to the house with her brother and his mate to score some gear. Her brother was just another guy off the estate but his friend stabbed a kid last summer and Jeremy is all too aware how people like that get pissed off over the smallest shit. He told himself he couldn’t afford to tell her to fuck off in case she brought her brother and the thug back to cause trouble. So each day when she rang the doorbell he’d go to answer in and then stand aside. She’d always come in.

A couple of days ago she’d come round when he was cooking. He’d been baking bread and his chin, spiked with two days worth of stubble was coated in a thin layer of flour. He let her join in and when they’d finished kneading the dough, their arms and faces were white. She’s said they’d looked like surgeons with gloves up to the elbows and masks all made of flour. He didn’t tell her surgeons don’t wear that long kind of glove. He couldn’t bring himself to correct anything she said, always in fear of her brother and the friend coming back to stir up trouble. Jeremy knew if he couldn’t bring himself to correct her, there was no way he could tell her he still didn’t know her name.

The phone rings, a muffled noise from one of the back rooms of the flat, but they both jolt at the sound as if someone were catching them doing something sordid. Jeremy is standing before he realises, his eyes almost blinded by the head rush and soon he is in the back room, the room where he sleeps, speaking into the receiver and hoping that the slurring in his voice doesn’t sound as bad to the caller as it does to him.

It’s the Legal Secretary, she wants to meet – tonight. He breathes a sigh of relief, this is the call he’s been waiting for. He thought she’d never give him a second chance after their last failed date. He agrees a time to meet and it’s only as his arm is reaching down to put the receiver back in its cradle does he remember the girl sitting in his living room.

He has to meet the Legal Secretary; she’s actually given him a second chance. But what about the girl? He considers briefly leaving her with Sam, but dismisses it, he wouldn’t leave any young girl alone with him, especially this one. It’s not an option, Jeremy remembers, because Sam is away until tomorrow. He’ll just have to ask her to leave.

It’s almost too dark in the living room when he returns, not because it’s late but because the tiny flat gets no real daylight after six in the evening. He switches on a light and the room is washed in a sickly yellow glow. The girl actually blinks as she becomes accustomed to the light. She looks younger than ever.

“I have to go out,” he says, not daring to sit down and relax. She doesn’t move. “Now,” he adds.

“Oh,” she tilts her head to the side, looking like she can’t quite comprehend that he actually leaves the flat. This idea and her puzzled expression almost make him laugh and he realises he’s still heavily stoned. Jeremy manages to regain his composure by thinking about where he’ll take the Legal Secretary, what she’ll be wearing, whether he can pick her up in the van or if he should splash out on a taxi to impress her.

“Where?” the girl asks. The words seem to take a lifetime to get to him, he’s staring out the window behind her head, like she’s already left the flat. “Where are you going?”

“I’ve got to meet someone. Business.” He looks at the girl, breathes in deeply and says, “So you’ll have to go.” He waits for her lip to tremble, for her to let out a huge jaw cracking wail like a cartoon baby, but nothing happens.

When she does finally open her mouth, all he really hears is that she’s not angry. “Okay. But can I wait here till my bus is due? There’s only one an hour to the estate.”

“You live on the estate?” Jeremy asks. He’s shocked, she seemed too clean, too smart to be one of those girls. He pictures her hanging outside the tall concrete buildings, hungry and bored, maybe with a can of coke, or a fag in her hand. “Sure, whatever.” He shrugs, then to soften things “I’ll see you later though, right?”

That’s all it takes to put a smile on her face and make him feel safe enough that she won’t go home to her brother and give the order for Jeremy to be messed up or knifed.

While he wipes his armpits and changes his shirt in the backroom he wonders if he’s being paranoid about this girl’s older brother and decides it’s always best to be careful. He quickly makes the bed, pulling the duvet over the mattress and checking nothing is sticking out from underneath it, in the hope that he may just get the Legal Secretary to come back with him tonight.

The girl sits in the living room, feeling guilty that she lied about living on the estate, about needing to wait for a bus so she could stay in the flat. She pokes at the bruise on her knee that looks greenish round the edges under the yellow light and promises herself she’ll explain the truth to Jeremy when he returns. She already knows she won’t say a thing as she’s planning where to look first when he leaves, thinking what it’ll be like to see his bedroom, smell his clothes, let the bristles on his toothbrush edge across her tongue.

Then he’s back, wearing a blue and white chequered shirt and smelling like her older brother, covered in peppery chemical aftershave. She stands up when he comes close but she’s not sure why, she knows she’ll be staying here. He actually leans forward and touches her arm when he says goodbye. She thinks his hands feel soft and cool, like her gran’s. Jeremy hastily explains how to close the front door and that the fat flatmate won’t be back until tomorrow, so not to worry. Then he’s gone.

She hears the front door close and she stands perfectly still, just waiting in the silence of the flat. Her hand shoots to her crotch in anticipation and she pushes hard, like she does when she needs the toilet. But with the excitement, there’s a problem. Now she’s alone in the flat she realises that the only light on is in the living room. The door to the long thin hall and all the other rooms is already dark and her legs buckle at the thought of walking down the hall to reach the light switch.

The clock reads six twenty and the girl knows she has to be home for dinner and she is sure that Jeremy could come home any moment or ever worse, the fat flatmate could return from his trip early. Suddenly, her mind rushes through a series of possibilities, the flatmate hitting her with one of his records, mistaking her for a burglar, Jeremy coming back to the flat with a woman or that she’s too scared to leave the living room all night and eventually wetting herself.

The thoughts stop as quickly as they started and she walks to the edge of the door and puts one hand into the darkness, finds the wall to her left and begins to step into the black, guided all the time by the damp wallpaper under her fingers.

In his bedroom, she searches quickly, trying to commit the positions of objects to her memory so once shifted she can return them unnoticed. A sudden pang of guilt and the memory of once being caught going through her mother’s purse freezes her. She shifts away from the bed and the dirty clothes on the floor. She is about to turn, to leave the flat, get the bus home and forget about all of this, but then something stops her.

In her head she’s already standing at the bus stop, she can feel the wind whipping at her knees and thighs but now she’s seen the corner of a photograph peeking out from underneath Jeremy’s mattress.

The girl casually walks over to the bed and with a sweeping gesture that she hopes could seem accidental she brushes away the loose sheets to get a better look at the shiny plastic paper.

It is a photograph; she’s sure, a colour image, probably of a girl. She can make out the crook of an elbow and a wisp of hair. She tugs at the photo and it slides out easily, bringing with it a set of brothers, all colour, all with the same neat white Polaroid frame and all of the same girl. Except she’s not a girl, she’s a woman.

The woman in the photograph looks mostly playful as she stand in her underwear or sometimes one of Jeremy’s shirts. The girl studies the images in turn, moving quickly between them, trying to piece together the puzzle of the relationship between this woman and the man whose bedroom she is standing in. She wonders who else has seen these photos, and if the woman knows that Jeremy keeps them under his mattress.

A quick survey of the background in the photos reveals they were all taken in this room. In one, the corner of the window is showing, in another the woman lies on the very bed the pictures were under. The girl feels curious, then sickened and finally a stunned kind of acceptance forms around the images. She decides to try and work out how old the photographs are by looking for things in the room that have changed since they images were taken.

That’s when she sees it sitting on the shelf. It’s next to some empty bottles with candles sticking out of them and the only book in the room that has a spine that has never been broken. She hopes secretly that it’ll be dusty or even broken. Before she even picks the camera up, she knows it’s not.

It feels heavier than she expects and when she lifts the front section open it whirls so loudly she nearly drops it. To her the lens looks like one unblinking eye, ready to capture all the flaws, all the details, all the secrets of the person standing in front of it.

She doesn’t allow herself to think over the plan that comes rushing through her head because she knows if she did then it would crumble with her courage. Instead she places the camera on the bed and slowly begins to unzip her jacket. She knows that if she wants Jeremy for her own she’s going to have to give him something special.

When her shirt and bra are pushed down around her waist she picks up the camera again and tries to turn it slowly so the big fish eye is pointing at her. She smiles, she wipes the smile. She smiles again, thinking of MTV videos and the sporty girls at school. She does her best to look happy and healthy. Then she thinks of Jeremy and waits for the flash.

The first picture is blurry where she moved and captures only the corner of her head. She looks pasty and shocked, like someone has caught her off guard. The second is better and after that she learns when the flash is coming and how to lean toward the lens.

She wonders if her breasts are too small and compares them with the photos of the woman in the expensive underwear. Even though the bra is nice and matches her pants, the woman’s breasts aren’t that much bigger than her own. She can’t tell whose nipples are better because the woman never gets hers out.

There’s a thick black felt tip pen on the side and the girl carefully writes her name all over the pictures, being sure not to cover any body parts that look good with the ink. On one photo she even manages to circle her breast with the letter C. artistic, she thinks.

She’s still thinking about the photos when she reaches home. Her mother has cooked dinner and her older brother is asking if she wants help with her art project. None of that seems important; she just waits for Jeremy to find the pictures. It’s not like he can ring her, but she’s sure somehow she’ll know when he finds them.

Jeremy isn’t even annoyed when he finds the girl has left the lights on in his flat, the Legal Secretary has come home with him and there’s a six pack in the fridge and a loaded bong on the side.

She stumbles drunkenly into the kitchen, looking for a clean glass to get some water but he pulls her into the bedroom. He tells her to wait and rushes down the corridor to Sam’s room, praying that the fat bastard has a condom somewhere in his stuff.

The Legal Secretary lets out a weird kind of noise and for a second he pictures the girl asleep in his bedroom, waiting for his return. But it’s late, he’s sure the kid must be safe at home, wrapped up in her own bed by now.

He returns to the bedroom, condomless and trying to think of a line that might make the Legal Secretary still go ahead with sex. When he sees her at first he thinks she’s looking at the dirty snaps he took of her on their first date, then he catches a glimpse of the pale flesh in the picture, and he knows what has happened even before he sees the Legal Secretary’s face and watches as she mouths the name Candice.