Falling Away

there?"

I

There had always been a fine line between running away and life preservation and now that he was a long way from that place, the verdict was in. What he couldn’t distract himself from was the heat. The heat always brought out the hate in him, the hate for heat. He hadn’t hated the nine hour bus journey, which had impulsively ended here. He hadn’t even hated the fat kid who had squashed him against the window while he drooled his way through an action man comic book and for Eddie Scout and Jerry Only. He had nothing but the warm fuzzy feeling that came with a clean get away. It was late afternoon; his collar was damp with stale perspiration. He needed a shower or at least another beer or more.

He sat quietly at the end of the bar scribbling fiercely into his notebook; he often read his words aloud as he wrote. What he didn’t like was people watching him while he did it like he was a circus freak. The glass of frighteningly cold beer, however, was proving a powerful distraction. The place was deserted and the girl behind the bar had more than a hint of desperation about her. He had the uncanny ability to read people the way most could read a cheap detective novel but for now he was distracted by a simple question, Why is it so hot in here?

Welcome to the Three Little Pigs, the sign had said out on the street. He didn’t believe that you could judge a book by its cover or a man by his clothes but when he saw that sign almost falling down in an otherwise barren street, something inside him back flipped with joy.

He began whistling before he sipped his drink, read through the completed page, twirled his pen, then laid it down and drank profoundly from his tall glass.

He considered the words on the page with defaming eyes before returning his attention to the beer and then thoughtfully turned the page. He tapped his left foot, which rested on top of his battered duffle bag. His whole life, or what was left of it, was in that bag. He could see out of the corner of his eye that the girl was watching him as she polished a tray of fresh glasses, which he didn’t mind at all. He placed down his glass which still had a good two mouthfuls left, as if it could be any other way. He took up the pen and tapped the point expectantly at the top of the page. The Ode to Memory had consumed him for longer than was medically advisable. He had notebooks filled with verse and prose, what any of it meant he wasn’t sure. That wasn’t in the job description.

Perspiration trickled down the back of his neck. She was still watching while he aggressively slapped at the back of his neck and made a show of it like he was fighting an army of blood suckers. He cast his gaze over the joint. He had never been in a place so bereft of life. The place he had come from could be summed up in a single word. More. People, traffic, pollution, noise and too much neon and for now that was motive enough to be in a place like this. Less. The more he thought about it, what the world really needed was a lesson in less, more wasn’t going to save the world anymore, that much was obvious.

He leafed through the afternoon’s work, six pages of it. He raised his newly emptied glass in mock salute as he flipped the notebook shut. Here was to the Ode to Memory, may it one day be forgotten. He scooped up his tools and buried them deep inside his bag like a weary artisan. He had made a career out of strategically placing his completed works in random places, he couldn’t recall when the idea had struck him or even the first time he had done so.

There was a loose floorboard underneath his bed at the Liar’s Den stuffed with enough paper to make a paper trail from here to the moon. He had stuffed more pages in the cracks between lockers at the bus station from whence he had come, and in the early days he had left completed notebooks on train station platforms. He didn’t know why he had felt compelled to do this but he was sure it would work. He didn’t see the point of possession and he questioned what it was he could actually own but he didn’t like to bore himself with such thoughts, much less others.

He gestured to the girl for another and slid the correct change across the bar. He looked at the bottles stacked high above the bar and then swivelled on his seat to take in the barren hideousness of his environment, but good beer was good beer. He wiped more perspiration from the back of his neck and closed his eyes and smiled at the thought of all those goons milling around the Liar’s Den. He wasn’t good with names but he could describe each and every one of his fellow reprobates right down to the colour of the soles of their shoes. But the tractor pull aura of the girl behind the bar returned him to the now.

Are you allowed to drink on duty?

Who me?

Immediately she felt stupid, embarrassed and a string of other adjectives beginning with S. She had felt it herself since she had been back, she wasn’t the same and she hated hearing this from her family much less admitting it to herself. The old Haley would never cower to such stupidity. She could think of three hundred and twenty-five places that she would rather be but for now this was all there was. They always told her the same thing, she gave up too easily. She couldn’t keep running home at every bump in the road. What kind of parents would say that to a child? Tough love had been her father’s motto since forever and in the months after her mother’s passing, everything seemed to conspire against her. As for the stranger studying her face from over the bar, he had that beaten dog quality; she was a sucker for a beaten dog.

Who’s buying?

He liked her smile, he tried to smile at least once an hour in the course of any given day but this girl’s smile was like the atomic bomb of smiles. Her eyes burned brighter, her lips reddened and softened like someone was looking through a trick photography lens. Then, with a theatrical gesture of his right hand, he unleashed a smile of his own. The last time someone had smiled at him this way they were holding him up against a brick wall in a dark alley somewhere with a switch blade at his throat. Terrance Carver detested all forms of violence, especially those acts committed against him.

Knock yourself out.

You got a name?

Terrance.

Rule number three, never accept a drink from a stranger. She smiled again.

Morals are important.

The girl felt herself blush as she poured herself a beer. She waved away his offer of payment. In silence they drank, savouring the respite from the heat. She put down her half-drained glass, their eyes met and she held his stare. She was young, perhaps nineteen. He hoped she was standing on a telephone book. Tall women were not to be trusted. This was an undeniable fact.

There’s this place called the Liar’s Den, it’s I guess what I would call home. They have two kinds of beer, three types of whiskey and a single bottle of rum behind the bar. The barman looks like he’s wandered out of a horror movie and can’t find his way back and it’s filled with people who are either rude drunks or stupid drunks. But when I walked into this place, I felt a lot more at home than I ever did there. There’s just one thing.

And what’s that?

Is it always this hot?

She ignored his question and took her glass and made her way around the bar and sat down beside him. He swivelled slightly and watched her sit down, her hair was dark and long, almost good enough to be in one of those magazine advertisements. But in the experience of Terrance Carver, it was what lay below the surface that truly defined the beauty, ugliness or stupidity of this race called human.

I’m Haley.

Like the comet.

She tried not to smile, he had that look in his eye that said that it was okay, he was in on the joke too, but she found it impossible to let a bad pun go by unrewarded. There seemed to be a lessening number of people in the world that could make her laugh; laughing at people tripping over crossing at traffic lights didn’t count.

Work here long?

A few weeks, family business.

Well, you’re doing a bang up job. He raised his glass.

She drank and smiled, he was well and truly mesmerised by this point.

And what do you do, Terrance?

He drank while he considered the question carefully. He’d once been told that a conversation with a stranger where the question what do you do? wasn’t asked was a truly memorable occasion, but so far, this one was running a close second. He thought of the all the toothless grins, the smashing glasses at the Liar’s Den and almost smiled. It felt good to sit at a bar and not have to look over his shoulder waiting for what was never really worth waiting for in the first place.

I’m in the words business.

She didn’t say anything, didn’t even smile, instead she finished her drink, took the empty glasses and he watched her return behind the bar to refill them. Her smile had gone, replaced by something less explosive. She stayed on her side of the bar as she slid his drink across with which he toasted her generosity momentarily igniting an ephemeral smile.

I hate it here.

The heat?

No.

City girl?

Grew up here... Been away for a while.

Not the happy homecoming you imagined?

Put it like this, my first night behind the bar was a Friday night. I was working with my stepsister when two guys started throwing fists for no apparent reason. One of them, Jamie Jones, voted in my final year of high school most likely to be a complete loser for the rest of his life, hit Rhys Lewis, voted in my final year of high school to be the most likely to be beaten up on a regular basis for the rest of his life. Jamie hit him so hard the crack of his fist into his jaw was so loud, it stopped every single conversation dead. There were maybe twenty guys in here. I know looking around now it’s hard to imagine but they all stood and watched this guy pick up his teeth from the floor. As he stood, someone pointed at me, shouted ’she’s a nurse‘ and I ended up taking the idiot down to the hospital and waiting for three hours while they glued his teeth in and wired his jaw. I left this place for a reason. I think the reason’s pretty clear.

You’re really selling the place.

I used to come in here on Saturday mornings when I was young. I’d help sweep up all the peanuts, the broken glass, and I’d polish the table tops. The old man would show me how to polish the glasses and I used to make a game of it. He still talks about that, I don’t know why, we don’t really talk anymore. I don’t think I’m making any sense. But at least I’m good at it.

She sighed, focused on her fast disappearing beer, she knew she was talking in circles. Her grandmother had once told her that looking at her was like looking at her father at her age, and there had been few things she had hated hearing as much since. She didn’t buy into family anymore after her mother’s death. All those uncles and aunts who had been such a large part of her life seemed hell bent on forgetting that Joanne, the mother of Haley Moore, had ever existed.

The last thing Haley Moore had said to her mother in the months before she had died still didn’t bear thinking about and she knew the old witch had told her father. Even now, all these years later, she could still see the repressed disappointment behind her father’s bland brown eyes. Blandness was the thing she despised most in people; she saw it all too often in her father’s eyes, had it always been there?

***

The arrival of Haley Moore into the world hadn’t been planned or welcomed by too many of those who would later make up the four walls of her existence. Richard Moore had been an apprentice mechanic in town while Joanne Ray was a day dreamer lamenting that her feet were too big for a ballet dancer. This was what she remembered most vigorously about her mother, she was a dreamer and had never been ashamed of being such. When news of the pending arrival had been made public, the shame had almost proved unbearable for the youngest daughter of Stephen and Marjorie Ray.

There had been no wedding photo, no honeymoon and there hadn’t even been an announcement in the local newspaper. Why the couple had never had a second and third child had baffled the only child all through her earliest years, but she had always been too frightened to ask. Years later when she was sent off to boarding school, her parents finally had that honeymoon and she remembered standing at the airport waving goodbye, feeling sad and empty inside. Her mother had only a year to live by this point.

***

It was three years later that her father Richard Moore remarried Amanda Riley, a tall, slim dark haired woman who looked like she belonged on the set of a nineteen sixties Hammer horror film, but her laugh, so loud and infectious, was the one thing that made hating her almost impossible. She was two years younger and had lived with her only daughter in town for the past four years, since her husband had lost interest in his family and run off with a woman/girl half her age. Amanda Riley had never been a stranger to the Moores, her daughter Kirstin, had gone to the same primary school as Haley in the year below.

Amanda had been a social worker at the high school until that day her husband ran out on the two of them. She had spent the first months in a daze of nightmares and a world that just didn’t feel real anymore. It wasn’t until she had found the courage to seek a councillor herself that life began to return to what it should be. How she had met Richard Moore was, in her mind, an unforgettable story. It would forever put a smile on her face to think of her big strong man carrying that cattle dog he had hit in his beat-up sedan into the reception of the doctor’s surgery where she had been temping with an unsteady voice.

There’s a vet three doors down.

Christ, look at him, the poor bugger needs help now.

Just calm down, I’ll call Peter.

You can call Paul and Mary as well for all I care, just do it now.

It hadn’t been until the following week that this tall, dark, handsome stranger had walked back into her life, armed not with an injured dog but a bouquet of flowers. He had even walked her to her car and smiled at her bad jokes before he had lost patience with the situation and asked her out to dinner. It was a short three weeks later that both decided their children should be informed of the blossoming romance.

The day her father introduced the new woman in his life had been unsettling. She still visited her mother’s grave every Sunday and this new woman was immediately seen as a threat. She hadn’t held back in conveying this to her father later that night when the others had gone. The memory of that winter’s afternoon at the dinner table where they had told her of their intentions to marry, the tears had come unexpectedly and resonated with a confused sense of joy, nothing was ever easy.

Haley had just turned fifteen by the time they had been married in an intimate ceremony out on the local church grounds. In the years since her father’s second marriage there had been one constant, Kirstin Riley, her stepsister younger by one year but profoundly more messed up than anyone had the right to be. Both girls had taken an intense dislike to each other from the moment their grieving parents had found that life hadn’t done with them yet.

The first summer the new family had spent together had been one of high tension and tears. The two girls, newly-sistered, repelled each other the moment they were left alone, both accused the other of jealousy or pettiness, depending on their moods; watching her father deal with uncertainty with this had made her loathe the interloper even more.

The worst had been the drawings she had found in her new sister’s diary of herself on a broomstick with devil’s horns and pig trotters for hands. The severity of this was lost on her father who seemed more concerned that she had stolen and gone through the diary in the first place.

She’s hideous, horrible, ugly, stupid and I loathe her more than loathing.

All in that order? her father had smirked.

And I hate you too for taking her side.

Why does Amanda get left out of all this loving?

I’ll think of something, she spat.

Go and apologise to Kirstin. Now.

***

Kirstin Riley had disappeared twelve months before Haley Moore had stood at the bus station with her life packed in a bag. Kirstin, when not screaming at her stepsister, had always been quiet, introspective and obsessed with art. She sketched, painted and drew at the expense of all else. At the age of eighteen, she had received a scholarship to art school on the other side of the country but upon arriving at her new school, she became disillusioned with her peers, her teachers, the coldness of the classroom, and saw conspiring eyes all around her.

It was at this time, as her life was unravelling, that Kirstin Riley had received a letter from her father, the spineless, pathetic coward who had run off when she had needed him most. How it had found its way to her dorm she had no idea but the too hastily scribbled apology for the grief he had caused only served to stir in her emotions that the world had promised had been dealt with long ago. He told her where he was living now. She didn’t care. He told her that he had a young son now. She didn’t care. She had told her mother in one of her last letters home and made her scorn and hatred of the traitor strongly known.

After a rocky first semester, the letters and phone calls stopped. There had been troubles with getting into the classes she wanted and even more trouble getting out of the classes she hated. The silence lasted two weeks and neither parent could stand it. No more calls were made to the school and the dormitory where she was boarding and no one had any information to give other than that Kirstin Riley had withdrawn from her studies before the semester’s end and hadn’t been seen since. It wasn’t long after this that a letter appeared from the wayward lamb, her mother’s words not Haley’s, which said simply that she had broadened the search for her art and she was sharing her adventure with a woman called Samantha, a fellow artist.

It was three months later when the next letter arrived and there was little talk of following her art or this mystery woman Samantha; instead, there were pages of acerbic accounts of her nights spent pouring drinks behind sleazy bars and being evicted from her room by a transvestite speed freak called Simona. The only mention of the mystery woman Samantha came at the end of the letter when she said doing anything with a broken heart was a thousand times more difficult and then the inevitable question came, could they send her some money just to help her get back on her feet?

Of course, they did exactly what the brat had demanded and no one seemed surprised when the next month there came another letter, yet again more money was sent. What followed, she had since been told by her stepmother, was a week of her father sleeping on the couch and neither talking to each other unless it was to scream at the other. When the next letter arrived, it was made clear in the reply