When You’ve Wished Upon A Plastic Star
by Steven Dines
Alan wakes at 04:57, his face on a pillow that feels like a soaked handkerchief. The beeping alarm pierces the stillness of the room, like a truck backing up. Funny, he feels like he’s been run over in the night.
He turns off the alarm.
I never used to be a drooler, he thinks, wiping his cheek with the back of his hand. ‘course, I never used to be a lot of things, but isn’t it amazing what you become? What you will put up with?
Dogs instantly salivate when they smell chickenmeat—he’d read that somewhere. They don’t have the option not to drool; it’s something to do with special molecules in the aroma that send their olfactory systems into meltdown. Maybe that’s why they hand out extra napkins with every bucket at KFC, for those inevitable carpet stains. They can smell it through the packaging, too, dogs can, and they’ll sit there staring shamelessly, as saliva pools around their paws, one of which will be partly raised in hungry anticipation. It can’t be helped though. Dogs and chicken. Men and dreams—this man anyway. It can’t be helped.
The bedroom ceiling is covered with over one-hundred-and-fifty plastic glo-in-the-dark stars, purchased from one of those shops that also sells polished rocks and rubber snakes. The ‘glo’ aspect lasts just a couple of hours, and any mystical properties fade overnight; by morning they are once more yellow plastic shapes blu-tacked onto a ceiling painted matte black. But during those two hours when all is dark and still anything can seem possible…
Alan swings his legs out of bed and sits up, nursing his head as blood rushes to it, making him feel dizzy.
She called him again last night.
She climbed out of their bed, took the handheld phone into the bathroom with her, and hid behind a stream of water and, like two lovers in a movie, they whispered and made promises to each other.
On unsteady legs, he leaves the bedroom, only pausing by the phone long enough to wonder if the handset is still warm from all their sex-talk. He resists finding out.
On the landing, he hesitates outside the bathroom door. He lets himself be distracted by the window overlooking their back garden. The grass out there, it could drown small children. The blue-black sky is bleeding; red seeps from the rooftops and chimneys across the way, up, up, and up, filling the sky like some great dark bowl hungrily accepting the first few drops of sacrificial blood. The day has its throat cut every morning and it bleeds all day long.
Did she come?
What?
Did she come? Orgasm? Did she come to the sound of his voice? Did she stick the handset inside her-fuckin’-self while he went, ‘hummmm…?’
I don’t know.
Well? Did she?
His chest tightens; he can hardly breathe.
I don’t know. My god, stop doing this to yourself.
The constriction gradually eases off.
Panic attack. A minor one. That’s all.
Okay, so what now?
‘Shower, shave, shit,’ he announces. ‘As always.’
At first, the water feels like a thousand cold baby-fingers tapping on his head, neck, and shoulders, and he has to really fight the urge to rip the shower head off the wall, take hold of its flexi-metal neck, and twist hard. But as night-sweat slides off him like a second skin and vanishes down the plughole with the water and suds, he starts to feel a little more in control.
He uses a disposable razor and a hand-held mirror to shave standing in the shower. The mirror reflects only a small portion of his face at any time. He likes it better that way. It’s not the cleanest of shaves either, because the blade is old and partly clotted with hair and crusted foam, but somehow he can’t seem to bring himself to throw it away. He remembers Susan suggesting he dispose with the disposables and buy himself one of those fancy Mach 3’s. He had not appreciated the knowing smile on her face. ‘I’ll stick it out with this one,’ he’d said. ‘For now.’ Annoyed, she’d replied, ‘The bloody thing doesn’t work anymore’, and stormed out of the room.
He towels off, leaves in the bathroom a hanging cloud of steam, anti-perspirant, and aftershave spray. Susan hates it: when she gets up for her morning piss it’ll stick in the back of her throat, make her cough; a synthetic panic attack. He closes the bathroom door, kills the ventilation, feeling triumphant and petty at the same time.
Naked, he walks to the end of the landing and enters the study. The light is off, the darkness womb-like. He flicks the light-switch. Born again.
There is the huge desk; the three-gigabyte PC; the laser printer; the stylish leather chair; the shelves; the hundreds upon hundreds of books. Waiting for him.
His clothes are draped across the chair-back so he can dress in the mornings and not have to wake up Susan. He slips them on and sits down.
‘Had the shower, had the shave,’ he says. ‘Now it’s time for the shit.’
He boots up the computer. It hums, resonates.
The wallpaper, ‘Ziggy…’ by Tom Wilson, shows a cliff-edge right out of the Roadrunner cartoons. There is a sign. It reads: INSPIRATION POINT. Precariously close to the edge stands a desk, on which sits a typewriter with a blank page curled into it. A bald cartoon figure sits in front of these. His hands aren’t on the keys. There is a strong hint of a long drop.
He double-clicks the ‘Writing’ folder then a file inside called ‘Untitled’. It opens to reveal some scattered words, phrases, even a line or two, down the left-hand-side of the screen, but nothing resembling a paragraph or, holiest of holies, a complete page.
He sits for twenty-five minutes, writes half as many words. It’s a more productive start that usual.
Then, it isn’t easy to write when your fiancé is fucking another man.
Another?
Good point.
You have all the correct tools, Alan, but you don’t know how to use them anymore. The desk? So much unused empty space. The all-conquering powerhouse personal computer? Really, what is the point? The laser printer? A relic, a keepsake, it lives on a diet of blank sheets fed through it just so you can remind yourself what it sounds like. The leather chair? Style over comfort all the way. And these books? These books you surround yourself with, most of them never read? They sit on the shelves with their spines toward you, looking the other way. They’re ashamed, Al. As you should be.
I could leave her. I could quit writing.
Which?
What would be the point anyway? He knew about the affair two months ago. Besides…
He glances at the top of the monitor screen, at a dog-eared yellow Post-It note. On it is written one of those motivational mantras. He had read somewhere that real writers used them, so he made up some of his own. They are disposable things and yet, like his razor, he can’t bring himself to throw this one out. It reads:
There is no going back, only forward.
Momentarily inspired, he types:
Is it not better to perpetuate one mistake passionately than go back to square one with your tail between your legs?
He stares at the words. An idea arrives fumbling and kicking inside his mind.
What if?
His hands hover over the keyboard, trembling. Electricity seems to leap from finger-pads to keys and back. A circuit.
I’ll have to change the names of those involved though. I don’t want Susan to know that I know what she’s been up to. She might leave me, and if she was going to do that I think it would have happened already. With different names, I could at least claim coincidence.
And so Alan types the first line:
Alan wakes at 04:57, his face on a pillow that feels like a soaked handkerchief.
ENDS
June 14th, 2005 at 12:11 pm
Excellent work it was an enjoyable read!
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