D.I.Y.

by Zack Wilson

I’m lying awake, dry mouthed and stupid with drink, awaiting tomorrow’s bleary hangover. Obviously, I’m alone.
 The fact that I’m alone is no real surprise at the moment. I might have been surprised if earlier on you’d told me I’d be alone, but now it’s no surprise. Strange night really.
 I’d been spending another night down the local, The Green Man, trapped in the kind of immediate after work session that’s becoming a bit of a worry. The bar staff have started referring to me as one of the ‘regulars’, which feels nowhere near as flattering as I thought it would. It makes me wonder who I’ve become actually.
 Anyway, there was a new bar maid working tonight. One of those girls that’s so gorgeous it’s physically painful to look at her. She’s called Rebecca McCluskey but I didn’t know that when she was making my palms and my forehead itch with a smile that was slightly the perfect size of too big with a slight uneven gap between large bright front teeth and pale, plump lips, glossily inviting, and with her dark, dark brown hair, bobbed and swept so that you could see how ivory white her neck was and how it coloured slightly with a rose undertow of gorgeous awkwardness as Stewart, the twat landlord, introduced me to her as, “Ray. He’s one of the regulars. In here every night he is! Ha ha! And he’s got the same name as one of ‘The Professionals’. Ha ha! But you’re too young for that, duck.”
 Too young for me, too. Only twenty-one I found out later. Made my thirty-three feel fucking creaking geriatric. It was a quiet night for her first behind that bar, and I had too much time to get to know her.
 She’s a nice girl. She smiled a lot as she told me that she’d had to give up her Child Psychology course at Sheffield Hallam University and come to Ashby to look after her dad, who was ill. She didn’t say ill with what, just looked slightly awkward, which made me think it must be mental or problems with is bowels or summat. Thankfully, my stupid cider gob didn’t press the issue.
 It also didn’t tell her that I’d once been at university. I’m not proud of my six months at Nottingham seeing double every day. It probably killed my step-dad after all.
 She twinkled about the bar all evening, capable and skilful in almost everything she had to do, but with just the right hint of awkwardness in the slight shuffle of her flat-shoed feet and the way she bent for bottles from the fridge, demure and vulnerable, trying to hide the bits I wanted to see but couldn’t look at. I kept having to shake her smile out my head, her uneven front teeth and her brown eyes that began to look perfect black as the yellow lights in the pub brightened and outside the streets went from grey to promising blue to purple black night.
 I managed to keep her amused. She had plenty of time to chat between serving. It was a Tuesday, nice quiet night for a debut and she finished early too, around half nine. I was charming enough for her to want to stop and have a drink with me anyway.
 She sat with me at the bar, feet perched on the ring of metal at the base of the stool as though she was having to cling on in case she fell. She told me I could call her ‘Becca’. She sipped J2O whilst I guzzled cider. More cider than I wanted or needed or should have drunk. When I went for a piss I realised why. I was nervous.
 I only get nervous talking to women when I really like them. It’s something of drawback. I really liked Becca McCluskey and I’d only just met her. My forehead started itching from the inside as I zipped up my flies.
 I half expected her not to be there when I got back. But she was still sitting there in my place at the end of the bar, the pub quiet with drinkers attending to their own matters at their own tables and oblivious to her playing with the straw in her J2O bottle. She’d even bought me another pint of Strongbow which stood, fizzing and copper coloured, on the bar in front of her.
 I began to think that things were going well. They probably were. They probably did. I thought strange things about my youth passing and how it’s sometimes hard when you’re younger to really know what’s going on and shook my head ruefully. Then I went and sat bedside her.
 I kidded myself that age had taught me that action was all so when eleven o’clock came round and she said she had to get back home I said I’d walk her home. She smiled and said that would be nice. She didn’t live far away, her dad’s house was at the end of Wood Street, so we got there after about ten minutes slow walking through the silent small town streets.
 I managed to keep the chat going, even though the rising brick in my chest kept taking my breath and making it occasionally difficult. We paused outside her dads house, a semi-detached with a small garage and no car on the drive, one shy light showing behind an upstairs curtain. We stood facing each other and the night hummed softly in the yellow sodium street light.
 We faced each other and she flicked a strand of her dark hair behind her ear and made a nervous neck movement that was awkward and unsure. I took a step closer to her and she turned sideways but not away. our eyes caught and clinched, then unclinched with the kind of nervousness that’s painful and hard to hide.
 I scratched my nose and she looked up at the window with the dull light in it. then we faced each other again for an instant and she moved her face towards mine with an invitation I only caught too late as I’d already moved my face away and patted her on the back.
 Patted her on the fucking back.
 She’d walked up the short drive to the front door before I fully realised the mistake I’d made. She unlocked and opened the front door, then switched a light on in the hall. I could see perfectly as she turned and waved and said, “See you around then, yeah?”
 “Of course…yeah! I’m in the pub…I’ll be in the pub.” I exaggerated the cheerfulness of what I was saying and felt utterly stupid.
 But she smiled at me and I could make out the uneven front teeth as she gave me a little girly wave, a little upturned fist unclenching and fingers wiggling. Then she was inside.
 I put my hands in my pockets and fiddled with my keys and excessive amounts of change, a pisshead’s pockets. Then I walked home.
 When I got into my flat I wanted another drink. I had a half bottle of Tesco’s vodka in the fridge which was nearly full. I poured myself a dirty glass full and sat down, on my own in the living room.
 The setee was very threadbare and dirty, I noticed this for the first time and wondered how many other useless twats had sat on it before me. I gulped vodka and winced. I always drink vodka neat. It’s generally a painful experience, a penitential act, expunging the guilt that lingers around a drinker like me.
 I gulped it down and refilled the glass and took it into the bedroom. I undressed and sat on the bed and put the radio on. Radio 3, late night soothing string sounds. I took a sip of vodka and pretended I was going to sit and savour this drink but I actually gulped it in three and then fought off waves of acrid nausea by clenching my teeth and guts. I didn’t want to have to vomit.
 The effort of not vomiting really took it out of me though and I had to go and lie down on my bed, funny endorphic rushes making random nerve endings tremble. Then a pleasant immobilisation, the immediate effect of undiluted vodka on my brain. It was quite pleasant for a while, and the effort of the struggle against the nausea combining with the booze made me feel truly tired at last, drifting away from that pat on the back and into the present that sees me lying here, dry mouthed and stupid and waiting for the morning.
 I’m halfway asleep and beginning to forget when the screwing noise starts. It’s coming from upstairs and sounds like a screw being driven into wood by one of those big screwdrivers that you press into the wood and the head turns automatically, thus saving your wrist. It sounds like the bloke who lives up there is really going for it, the driving ‘devroom! devroom!’ sounds repeat frequently and with increasing intensity. Then there’s a pause as he takes a break, then it starts up again, ‘devroom! devroom! DERvroom!’ really building up, then the pause again.
 Bleary-minded, I half-bellow in sleepy, boozy annoyance, “Who the fuck does DIY at this time of fucking night?!” It really does sound like someone screwing bits of wood together, assembling a wardrobe or a dining table.
 Then I hear the voices. An even, deep male one that at first sounds like its giving instructions. Then a female gasp and some muffled hysterical mumbling. It goes quiet for a minute or so until the long vibrating drilling noises start again and continue for ages.
 “Who the fuck does..!” I start to yell, and then the realisation begins to swim through the vodka and the cider, especially when something starts banging against the wall too with an insistent and irritating thud, like a chunk of wood or a small hammer beating out an ever-quickening rhythm of taps and bangs that along with the driving buzzes of the drilling noise builds up to a frenzied crescendo of disturbance, then ceases, suddenly.
 There’s a loud female giggle, water babbling down a sink hole, then a deeper voice murmurs and it’s like they’re up there deliberately rubbing it in. It feels like they’ve watched me in the pub, followed me to Becca’s and then home and then decided to highlight my pathetic inadequate aloneness by being as together as possible directly above my head. I try and get up because I’m feeling like another drink, but I’m actually too pissed to move properly really so just lie where I am, all limp and hopeless, breathing heavily, looking at the ceiling where it all seems to have gone quiet for a bit. I begin to drift away again, sweetness in my head, a dream of rafts and balloons and dark eyes, when it begins again.
 He’s really going for it this time too. The screwdriver noise gets really loud, long deep drives that make the ceiling rattle and deep, murmuring moans that communicate desperate, urgent instructions. no one could sleep through this. I shout out, “Give it a rest you set of randy cunts!” but it makes no difference and who in their right mind would expect it to really but it would be nice if they showed a bit of consideration, I’ve got work tomorrow.
 They don’t. They just carry on, insensitive to the needs of a drunken pallet yard truck driver stewing in loneliness, emasculated by missed opportunity, guilt and self-loathing on a second hand mattress.
 He really drives it into her now. The long buzzing vibrations merge into an almost continuous throaty roar and then she starts screaming, no words but I get the enraptured gist of things. There’s a series of massive thuds, furniture bangs repeating like a machine against the walls until it finishes with a crescendo of thuds and screams and then a stillness and an afterwash of contented mumbling.
 “Thank you very fucking much!” I shout, and I swear I can hear a muffled reply. Something like, “Pleasure mate! Anytime!” which might just be the vodka making suggestions, but probably isn’t.
 I realise I’m sweating and still dressed. I take my shirt off and enjoy the momentary coolness, breeze prickling across my damp skin. Then I take my shoes and socks off, followed by the work jeans that could use a wash.
 I think about Becca and my hand drifts to my limp, drunk’s cock. I wrap my fist around it with depressing ease and think about Becca again, but the things I’d like to do to her don’t match the thoughts in my head and there’s no twitching response and I’m quite glad because somehow I’d feel filthy if there was.
 Wanking now would be bit like joining in someone else’s orgy, especially now that the drilling’s started again. Someone must have been working away, I think, and I wonder what’s wrong with his bed for it to make noises like that. Then I wonder what Becca’s smile’s like when she’s surprised or delighted and my mind spins its own little story of picnics and grass blown in the wind and streams and clouds hanging low over fields of May or sometime and I can find that I can even shut out the drilling and the screwing and all the reminders of emptiness and sadness if I just concentrate.
 Then it’s light and morning, and I’ve a right dry mouth and a shit job to get to and a heart that feels hollow, dusty and horrible.

 

One Response to “D.I.Y.”

~ This piece was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 and was filed under Short Story, Writing. You can make comments on it below. ~