The Blog of Lone

I feel guilty.  I’ve been too busy to pander to the blog monkey needs, so to make up for it, here’s a little present.  It’s a short story I wrote a while back and got into the student paper, but reading back through it today I realised just how naff it really was, so I’ve made some changes that I hope have worked for the better.  Enjoy and feel free to let me know what you think…

An Evening of Expectations

The evening had, I thought, started out rather well. Sitting alone in Jake’s nursing a scotch, idly making shapes in the puddles of spilt beer covering the greasy bar, I wondered which club to go to later. The Ice Club was a better place to meet people, but the music of The Edge was in a league of its own, extreme waves of sonic anguish melting glacially together. I decided The Edge. Mainly, if truth be told, because the substances I had taken before leaving the flat wouldn’t blend well with the more sophisticated atmosphere at The Ice. I would get tense, nervous, sweat constantly, crack, twist, just fucking lose it. No, the relaxed insanity of The Edge it would be, my eccentricities hidden in the swirling mass of the intoxicated. While I sat there abstracted thus, staring through the bar, someone came and sat on the bar stool next to my own. Without looking up I could tell it was a woman, her overpowering perfume swirling like a purple cloud around her. I thought it odd that in the near empty bar she had come and sat next to me, and even odder that she was alone, Jake’s wasn’t the kind of dive most women would think of coming to, not alone, not without a reason. I swung my head to look at her and asked, “Can I get you a drink or something?”
She had a narrow but pretty face, thin lipped, no lipstick. Her fringe cloaked eyes seemed to have difficulty focusing, her erratically dyed shoulder length multicoloured hair and a mish mash of eccentric clothing, almost all black, created a striking image. She carelessly brushed her hair back from her face with a black tipped and lazy hand, revealing an ear with so many piercings that it wouldn’t have looked out of place on some rainforest tribesman’s head. Just as I was about to say something witty along these lines she turned to face me and replied with a confident and lilting, “Sure”. I nodded at the obscure barman and he weaselled over.
“Whiskey on the rocks, and…”
“The same.”
I nodding my approval flung a ten at the man and he returned some change with equal disdain. We shared numerous drinks and less small talk, until eventually she announced she had to, “Go to the little girls room. For a fix”.
Feeling slightly unsteady by this point I simply nodded and muttered a vaguely coherent, “Enjoy”, at her retreating back. I slowly finished my whiskey and stood, noisily kicking my stool aside as she wandered back across the bar, receiving hard stares from several of the occupants of the shadowy kiosks littering the walls.
“Want to come to The Edge?”
“No.”
This I hadn’t really been prepared for, but merely shrugged and started to turn away.
“Let’s go straight back to mine.”
I stopped and turned back.
“Sure. Whatever.”
So far, so good, I thought.

Her place turned out to be a two room flat squatting above a betting shop in one of the seedier areas of downtown. Opening the door we stepped into darkness lit only by the red neon sign of the shop below, making the room appear disturbingly organic and vague.
“Electricity’s out”, she explained.
“Doesn’t bother me”, I replied in what I hoped a casual manner.
By this point I was finding it a little hard to keep a grasp on the situation, let alone be casual. The whiskey and drugs were allying in my system to make the world seem more than a tad surreal. I slowly began to notice a dull thudding that had been filtering into my brain since we’d entered, sometimes speeding up, sometimes slowing down. I asked about the sound.
“Probably just my boyfriend.”
“Ah. Ok.”
The tone of her voice suggested that this was perfectly normal and I began to wonder exactly who this woman was and what I had let myself in for.
“Who exactly are you?” I asked nonchalantly.
“Janine.”
“Nice name.”
Peering around at what little I could make out of the room, my wandering gaze settled on a silver trophy of a horse and rider gleaming in the rose light.
“Do you ride?” I slurred.
“No. I stole it from a jockey I slept with once. I took it as payment for some of the weird stuff he made me do, ” she said without turning to look at me.
Vague images of very short men with riding crops started swirling through my head. I opened my mouth to ask what could have been so bad as to make her steal such a prized possession, but limited myself to a worldly sounding, “Hmm”, instead. For my own peace of mind I’d decided I really didn’t want to know.
She slung her coat over a dimly lit piece of furniture. An excited screaming, rising in pitch, started from the next room, muffled only slightly by the closed door. The thudding increased in pace.
“Drink?”
“Please.”
She walked over to an unseen cupboard, took out two bottles, one whiskey, one vodka, and two glasses and filled one from each bottle and handed me my drink, leaving the other on the side. She then pulled a large kitchen knife from a drawer, excused herself, and walked through the door from which the thudding and screaming was coming. I took a sip of my drink, was pleased to find it was once again whiskey, but thought it could do with some ice. I peered around for a freezer and finding it, pulled the door open. The thudding and screaming stopped from the other room. No ice. Raised voices momentarily replaced the silence but stopped as abruptly as they had started. Disappointed, I closed the freezer again. As I turned, Janine walked back through the door. The kitchen knife glistened crimson in the neon lighting. Dipping the knife into the waiting glass and stirring her drink she raised the glass in a toast.
“Bloody Mary.”
The swirling liquid glowed red in the neon light coming through the window.
I raised an eyebrow and my glass in acknowledgement. Draining her glass in one swift gulp she stepped in closer, wrapped her arms around my neck and passionately kissed me. And that’s when the night got a little weird.