Nomance
Authors: T J Price
Tags: #romance, #recession, #social satire, #surrogate birth, #broad comedy, #british farce
T J Price
Copyright 2011 T J
Price
Smashwords Edition
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Table of Contents
One: Reflections in a Muddy Eye
Two: Golden Aphrodite’s Nightmare
Three: The Vultures of Romance
Four: Stepping on the Scales of a Cold Fish
One
:
Reflections in a Muddy Eye
Back in the early
Noughties,
Romance
, the florist’s shop, was closed.
Today was Sunday, and
even in this service-hungry part of the world (in the snob
hinterland of London between Chiswick and Kew) florists close on
Sunday.
The shop itself
occupied the front portion of a large, redbrick Victorian house. To
the rear, in the spacious and not-clean kitchen, Gwynne – a tall,
mean, rawboned creature of nineteen – sat next to the sink and ate
cereal from a bowl that he held cupped in the horny palm of one
hand. As he masticated, his slack jaw working in slow, circular
motion, he stared through the window at the long, dank garden. This
was filled by bags of fertilizer, stacked in rows and interspersed
by a profusion of purple-headed thistles, nettles in full flower
and fleshy, fetid weeds that even the florist herself, Gwynne’s
sister, could not name.
That very person,
Carla, was sitting at the kitchen table behind him. She was in a
foul mood. Her disposition was vinegary at the best of times, but
just then she was toiling over the accounts. Attempting to balance
the books of
Romance
always got her sourness up to full
strength.
And because his sister
wouldn’t stop griping out loud about the shop’s stagnant turnover,
the shop’s stagnant turnover was now extending its demoralising
influence over him too.
Why couldn’t she
understand that he didn’t care whether
Romance
went bankrupt
or not? All he wanted right now was for her to stop griping. Her
griping disturbed the peace, interrupted the baleful quietude of
the morning and therefore lowered the quality of his
meditations.
Oh, if she would only
shut the fuck up, then he could think about something good.
His restless eye fell
upon a bumper roll of chicken wire, rusting nicely in the middle of
the deteriorated garden path, and striving to ignore the mooing of
despair and frustration behind him, he allowed his mind drift back,
as so often before, to that joyous moment, four years ago in Hyde
Park, when he had found a wallet with fifty quid inside it.
He scowled.
It seemed life had gone
downhill ever since.
Residual sensations of
resentment flickered up within him, like flames in a combusting
compost heap. He was thinking, after a fashion, about the pop group
he had played with last year. It was a pop group that the audiences
had resolved not to like. In fact, the audiences seemed to hate
them. Considering they looked not a whit different from a thousand
other rock bands, it had been difficult to pinpoint just where they
were going wrong. Unless, of course, it was the music that was
wrong. In which case, as the drummer pointed out, they ought to get
rid of it. The trouble was, if they
did
get rid of the
music, they would have to get off the stage and do something else
with their lives.
But what’s that
going to be then, eh?
Gwynne had wanted to know.
No one was sure. So the
rest of the band got together and decided to give themselves one
last shot at fame, and, instead of getting rid of the music, they
got rid of Gwynne instead. He was the obvious choice really,
because they all hated him even more than the audience did.
Gwynne burned more
feverishly now as he recollected for the hundredth time how the
other members of the band had told him to get lost.
Seconds later his fever
abated somewhat when he reminded himself for the hundredth time
that the band’s attempt to make the audience like them still hadn’t
worked and they had split up anyway.
So then, he’d had the
last laugh after all, hadn’t he? And then, too, none of them had
ever found a wallet with fifty quid in it down Hyde Park, had they?
Eh? Eh?
The muted pleasure he
derived from this reflection was interrupted by a moan of
despair.
Carla’s really
convinced she’s fucked this time
, he mused languidly. But his
sister’s dire financial position was so familiar to him by now it
didn’t make him smile anymore.
After flat-lining for a
minute, Gwynne’s brain revived just enough to reflect upon another
painful aspect of the old band he used to play in – Tony the
drummer. He’d got the girlfriend he’d always wanted, hadn’t he?
That is to say, the girlfriend
Gwynne
had always wanted.
What galled him most
about that was how Tony hadn’t needed to put any effort into
getting Elaine. She had fallen in step with his plans straight
away, without showing any sign of having to think about it.
Well that (Elaine not
showing any sign of thinking) had stung his finer feelings at the
time, but a few months later when he heard she and Tony and split,
it (Elaine not showing any sign of thinking), had encouraged him
believe she was still the girl for him. Now he could offer her the
opportunity to fall into step with
his
plans without having
to think about it. And so he had duly phoned her next day and asked
her out.
She turned him down
flat.
And she didn’t hesitate
for one second, meaning she
still
didn’t need to think about
it.
But that was mad.
Not
thinking was supposed to be Elaine’s best assent. Not
thinking was something they both shared. In that respect, they were
made for each other. And yet, he had failed where Tony had
succeeded. Why?
Come on,
why?
Well, the answer to
that question didn’t take much figuring out – fortunately.
The answer was Tony had
a car and he didn’t. He was a mere pedestrian. And the thick roots
of that particular boil ran all the way back to the credit card
company who had given him even less time over the phone than
Elaine. Though to be fair, the credit card company girl had been a
lot more polite. In fact, her impeccable courtesy had quite thrown
him at the time and he had only blown his top after he put the
phone down and realised he still didn’t have any credit.
Elaine hadn’t been half
as scrupulous about keeping him from blowing his top over the
phone.
Having turned him down
without having to think about it, she went on to think about it and
out of pure youthful exuberance she told him their relationship
would never work out because he ate meat and she was a strict
vegetarian.
‘But it doesn’t
matter,’ he had told her.
‘Oh, it does, Gwynne.
It does.’
As bad luck would have
it, Elaine seemed to read the same magazines his sister did and
these had loads of stuff in them about vegetarianism. She pretty
well repeated it all now, word for word. Gwynne had to wait ten
minutes before he could put his side of the argument again.
‘But, it doesn’t
matter.’
There was a pause here
before Elaine tried a different way at getting him exceedingly
annoyed.
‘You see, Gwynne, it’s
what I believe in.’ She made that sound so pathetic – as if big,
strong Gwynne was pulling her snivelling little convictions apart.
As if, in fact, she wasn’t having a whale of a time. She cranked
him up good and proper by adding, in her teeniest, weeniest voice,
that she must sound like such a silly little girl, but she had to
believe in something,
didn’t
she?
Gwynne assumed she was
asking for a balanced opinion. ‘No. Because it doesn’t matter!’
That was the very
essence of his argument. He couldn’t have stated it more plainly.
And yet, there was no answer, apart from what might have been – of
all things – a half-stifled yawn at the other end. God, she was
thick! He would have to go through the whole thing with her
again.
‘Don’t you get it? It
doesn’t matter.’
Elaine had sighed, ‘You
really do have to try harder to express yourself. Men have to
nowadays, Gwynne. Try watching more daytime discussions on the
telly and you’ll get the right idea. As it is, you wouldn’t last
five minutes on
Trisha’s Morning Show
.’
And, going by her tone
of voice, it didn’t sound like Gwynne was about to last any longer
on
Elaine’s Mobile Phone
.
‘But – ’
‘No.’
‘All right,’ Gwynne
said, defeated.
Elaine, however, had
watched enough soap operas to know that arguments did not have to
end quite this equably.‘Listen, Gwynne. Go vegetarian yourself and
we’ll give it a try.’
Even though Gwynne
thought this over with lightening speed and came up with the
correct answer – that he would indeed go vegetarian – he didn’t
come close to articulating it before a squeak of naked panic
vibrated the telephone cable and Elaine began talking so fast she
gobbled like a turkey. ‘Remember though, to be a real vegetarian
you have to leave off meat for at least a whole year. That’s twelve
months.’
Gwynne was choked into
a cretinous silence.
And yet, after all, the
concept of waiting for a year was not altogether too strange to
him. An actual example came to mind. There had been a girl at his
school who was famous for promising she would wait a year for her
boyfriend to get out of Wormwood Scrubs Prison. And she had too!
So, it was humanly possible to wait for a year. Only, where would
Elaine be in all this? He would be the one proving his devotion by
waiting for her, but he would also be the one expected to live off
carrots and peas and not get any sex.
As near as damn it
banged up in jail!
Gwynne felt betrayed by
the blatant unfairness of Elaine’s demand and he voiced a final,
desperate plea for justice, ‘But, it doesn’t matter!’
One year ago, Elaine
answered by slamming the phone down on him.
Thinking about it now,
Gwynne found to his amazement that he should have promised to wait.
The year thing had come and gone almost like it was inevitable. And
although Elaine, in a final act of defiance, had later got back
together with Tony, surely they must have split a second time by
now – no doubt citing irreconcilable differences.
You see, Gwynne could
not believe that Tony was a vegetarian. Not with biceps like that.
And with her strong beliefs, Elaine must have given up trying to
reform him, even if he did have a car. Perhaps, then, there was
still a chance for him and her?
The question was,
should he try phoning again?
That depended. Could he
be so damned sure, after all, that Tony did eat meat?
With a spoonful of
milky cereal suspended in front of his open mouth, Gwynne racked
his brains to recollect what he could about the finer details of
Tony’s diet. He had seen Tony stuffing himself with sandwiches at
rehearsals often enough, but, somehow or other, he had never once
asked him what he had on them.
Idiot!
Well, his one recourse,
at this late stage, was to concentrate with all his might and try
to conjure up a visualisation of Tony’s sandwiches in the hope of
catching sight of the filling.
He closed his eyes and
strained.
Then he strained
harder.
The dense bone around
his temples creaked with the tension and . . . and . . . but it was
no good. Gwynne could do no more than glimpse the outer crusts.
In truth there is a
mystery at the heart of all things.
Shoving the cereal into
his mouth, he sensed that this mystery-of-life thing was
responsible for the unaccountable workings of fate.
Gwynne had been taught
a hard lesson about the unaccountable workings of fate when he’d
had the good fortune to find that wallet down Hyde Park.