Story: Tourmaline (part one)

Tourmaline

(part one)

Anton never smelled anything cook in this house.

He was not sure of fellow lodgers, that they existed.

In this city towers blitzed, shivered themselves to rubble, he had seen it happen.

Against a sunset, a seafront sky…as pretty and exciting an entertainment as you could wish…

Well, because you didn’t care about people.

Anton’s tower stood, and his key worked. The elevator didn’t. The stairs had water.

He looked out his window daily, let a fantasy idle, that he would hear the bang, a great bullet shot as a steel beam split; that he would kick the glass from its frame and ride the powdering concrete to safety.

 Were you frightened? No, I was not.

The figure approaching was Palma. Come to give him an identity, under cover of which he could go queueing, put his name on a list for housing. Get bumped, because misery earned points. Someone in a better room would lose.

This stretching of his legs was all in all to Anton. To walk, to ping stations safely, to be given his food tickets. He decided to have a listen. Have a sniff.

No toast, no bacon, no coffee. No hot showers. No place for washing clothes. No clothes to wash. His complaints carried him to the ground floor. In the glass of a firehose he saw a spectre, a grey sweatshirted unwashed figure, and when he opened the door Palma was on her phone.

Indifferent in the cold lane. Coat folded over her arm, hat cocked over chopped hair, scarf hanging loose. She pushed in, and Anton stumbled back. His bare wrist touched a cable that seemed to coil away. He waited, red-lit by the cabinet lights, becoming electrified.

He would put his hands on her.

She was on his chair reading his diary. “Anton, I can’t edit you. Why not at least give me poetry, if you can’t give me journalism? Express the details you’ve seen.”

“I put notes everywhere.”

“This sketch…what does it say?”

“Do I take the book from you, or do you give it to me? I’m being very careful.”

“You are being an obstacle. If you can work with other people, you can work. That’s the G.R.A.’s rule as well as mine. You have written ‘green uniforms’. Whose? What were they doing? You were on the beach picking up useful trash. You could have gone right to them, shown the soldiers your sketch, asked them to buy it from you. You could have stumbled, picked up your things so slowly and stupidly one would step down to pack you off. You could have yelled at them about Jocelyn.”

“I don’t like Jocelyn.”

“Anton. You have to think of approaches.”

“I could kill myself.”

“If you’re offering, I’d rather have you with a bomb.”

1

Tourmaline

Tourmaline (part two)

(2016, Stephanie Foster)