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    Hellbent
    Hellbent
    Hellbent
    Ebook88 pages1 hour

    Hellbent

    By Paul Blaney

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    About this ebook

    Hellbent is a collection of short stories by Paul Blaney, author of Handover.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSignal 8 Press
    Release dateMay 1, 2013
    ISBN9789881554093
    Hellbent

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      Book preview

      Hellbent - Paul Blaney

      Hellbent and Other Stories

      By Paul Blaney

      Hellbent

      By Paul Blaney

      Published by Signal 8 Press

      An imprint of Typhoon Media Ltd

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2012 Paul Blaney

      eISBN: 978-988-15540-9-3

      Typhoon Media Ltd: Signal 8 Press | BookCyclone

      Hong Kong

      www.typhoon-media.com

      www.signal8press.com

      www.bookcyclone.com

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, except for brief citation or review, without written permission from Typhoon Media Ltd.

      This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

      Cover image: Cristian Checcanin

      Contents

      Hellbent

      Man in a Wardrobe

      A Better Place?

      Basement Window

      Lawyer Vanishes

      Red Shoes

      Publication Credits

      Hellbent

      It’s September 6th 1997 and I’m in newly handed-over Hong Kong, in a fiercely air-conditioned eleventh-floor hotel room. I flew out of Heathrow last night, glad to escape the general hysteria, but for the last hour I’ve been watching TV: live coverage from London where it’s not yet lunchtime. I have three business meetings tomorrow before an evening flight; I should order up some dinner and take a sleeping pill, but I can’t stop watching. The flowers and the weeping crowds, the flag-draped gun carriage flanked by guards, and the two brave, motherless young princes.

      All of sudden, however, I’m thinking not of the royal funeral but sixteen summers back to the wedding. Thinking of my mother, who styled her hair like Lady Di’s, of a West Midland boarding school, John the Baptist, and a beautiful dark-haired boy. Memory is full of trap-doors: July 28th 1981, the eve of Charles and Di’s wedding and the day my mother left. Fourteen years old, I came home from buying tapes—Spandau Ballet and Visage—to find a clear space on the dining room wall where her favourite painting had hung: Salome, lit by a green and lurid light, and, on a silver tray pushed into her belly, the head of John the Baptist, cheeks spattered with gore, but eyes, like dying coals, still aglow. My mother was captivated by that painting; she was an atheist but she’d studied Art for a year at the Slade before she had me. Now it was gone and I couldn’t tear my eyes from that empty wall.

      The day she bought it I’d walked in on one of my parents’ rows. The picture lay face-up on the kitchen table, in a nest of string and brown paper. They stopped shouting and I moved between them to inspect it.

      Why don’t we ask Simon’s opinion? asked my mother.

      As if we don’t all know what he’ll say. My father stalked out of the kitchen. His footsteps faded on the stairs—ours was one of those tall, narrow flats, all stairs—to his office in the basement. An office that was a perfect extension of its creator, methodically ordered with easels and filing cabinets, architect’s blueprints and sketches, pencils of identical length in tin boxes, all sharpened.

      My mother flashed me one of her winks and together we carried the painting through to the dining room. Grab me a chair, lover boy, she said and began to whistle. Tell me when it’s straight.

      Tearing my eyes from the absent painting, I ran out of the dining room. Up the stairs I ran to the guest bedroom where she’d been sleeping for the past year. It was bare and empty, empty and bare: bed, carpet, dressing table, stool. I pulled open the doors of her wardrobe. Clothes hangers turned and came together clinking.

      My father found me still in there. He pulled me out of the wardrobe and we sat together on the bed. He lit a cigarette. I’d never seen him smoke—he just lit hers—and you could see why. Then he explained that my mother had left us, run off with a Canadian, a theatre director from Toronto. The first thing he’d known, he said, was when she called from Heathrow. ‘I don’t know how she could have done it, left us like this,’ he whispered as evening sunshine poured through the window. I made no reply. There seemed nothing very surprising in her leaving my father. But leaving me?

      Later he went to the pub and I found the Canada page in the atlas. Toronto was surrounded by water on all sides, like it had been built in a puddle.

      I slept in the guestroom, in her bed, and spent most of the next day there too. I feel I remember the wedding: crowds swarming around St. Paul’s, near my school, the horse-drawn carriage and the fairy-tale dress, but those are false memories, a blend of photographs and film footage. My father, keeping up appearances, said I should come down and join in the street party; it was a historic occasion and I’d be sorry one day if I missed it. I told him I was willing to take that risk. What I actually remember is lying in bed while cheers and laughter and popping corks and God Save the Queen and Rule Britannia floated up from the street below. It lasted long into the night, even after I’d closed the window.

      For a couple of months then I went off the rails. We both did. My father drank and I poked needles into sockets, set coats on fire, threw spanners wherever they would do most harm. It wasn’t what you’d call mischief; I did it all in a joyless way. In mid-September my father received a letter from my school—Catholic (like he was himself) but a watered-down version. They’d done what they could with a unique and imaginative pupil, but they’d quite understand if Simon found another place of education. Boarding school, my father decided in his wisdom, was the thing to put me back on track.

      And so, soon after dawn on the first Saturday in October, I stood by the Volvo in a new charcoal-grey uniform and with my bags already stowed. From the plane trees either side of me the starlings sent down a frenzied din. The lampposts were still glowing, and leaves tossed and drifted across our Islington street. More were gathered in the gutters, turning a soggy russet. My father revved the engine. I climbed into the passenger seat.

      On the motorway we didn’t talk. Instead he tormented me with Welsh male-voice choirs, ignoring the Bowie tape, Scary Monsters, that I’d set on the dashboard. Only as my new school loomed into view did he lay a leather driving glove on my shoulder. It’s the same place I was at, Simon. Believe me, it’ll do you the world of good.

      I said nothing, which was all there was to say. Seen from the road, across tobacco-dry grass broken only by the Hs of rugby posts, St. Aldate’s bore a cruel aspect. Not a soul to be seen, not even a bird. I looked from the neo-Gothic chapel to the turreted towers with their narrow windows, and imagined screams splitting the air. As a boy I attended a number of schools, all of them for longer than St. Aldate’s, but say the word school and those are the images I conjure.

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