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Addict
Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: England
Gender: Female
Posts: 126
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Holiday - Part Three
Later that day, Alfie sits at the kitchen table browsing the free newspaper. There isn’t much to read: a round-up of local shows and venues for a night on the town (none of which he can afford), a television guide (the proximity of the Mast making TV reception all but impossible), and a few poorly-written articles about minor celebrities who have lately graced the city with their presence (Alfie doesn’t know who any of them are).
He sighs and tosses the paper onto the recycling pile. The kitchen is yellow today. The walls are painted yellow anyway, but they never seem quite as yellow as this, when the summer sun blasts brazenly through the windows. The effect is one of a country farmhouse kitchen (Alfie imagines), where children get soft boiled egg yolk on their chins, mother wears a flowered apron, and father chews a lump of tobacco and reviews the latest market price for beef.
The old-fashioned furnishings are rustic enough (Titania likes to call them “bohemian”), the mess is homely enough, but there’s no getting away from the city outside. In a way, Alfie is glad. There’s something about the constant hum of the city, the lights glistening down the hill, the grey streets and the coloured cars. Like the Mast – you know where you are.
Titania tosses a pancake over the sink.
“Sweet or savoury?” she asks.
“Surprise me.”
Dan comes through from the lounge carrying the latest release of Physics Review.
“Did you hear about this, guys? They’re building elevators that go into space!”
Dan sports a head of closely shaven hair (Alfie is for the first time envious) and a pair of thick-plastic-rimmed glasses. He wants to study Physics at university and eventually become a doctor, but a complete lack of A-Levels is thus far detaining him. Titania nags him to enrol at college, but he always makes an excuse: too busy on my novel about Einstein, too busy on my thesis about black holes, too busy working on the yacht. The novel and the thesis, Titania suspects, are merely excuses to sit at his computer watching downloaded episodes of Stargate: SG-1 all day. As for the yacht, this was a project he launched some three years ago, promising that when it was finished the three of them would be able to go on sailing holidays in the summer. The yacht remains to this day a pile of timber in the back yard. Yes, Dan is the hopeless procrastinator; a man of great ambition and zero motivation – as a result he is frustrated, depressed, and constantly looking for something that will allow him to escape from his life.
“They’re going to build these massive platforms that are winched up on cables through the… Why the fuck didn’t you tell me we were having pancakes?”
He sits down at the table as Titania doshes out the first round.
“Don’t you have work today, Titania?” Dan asks through a mouthful of batter and cheese.
“It’s a weekend, fool.”
“It is? What's the date?”
"August 26th.”
“Christ. How did it get to August already?”
“That’s what time does, Dan. You should know all about that,” Alfie says helpfully. Dan flicks a lump of soggy batter at him, and it lands on his nose.
There’s a knock at the front door. For a second, no-one moves. They all think they imagined it. Alfie wipes the batter off his nose and gives Dan a glare.
There it is again, the knocking. Titania gets up and stares at the door as if it just burst into song.
“Did someone just…?”
“I think so…”
“Better answer it, I suppose…” She hesitates for a second, feeling a little out of her depth. Then she rocks forward and pulls the door open.
“Yes?”
A youngish man stands on the doorstep wearing a cheap suit and carrying a briefcase. He opens his mouth to speak, but before he can utter a sound Titania says, “Oh, no thank you,” and begins to shut the door.
“No thank you to what?” the little man asks.
“Whatever it is you’re selling.”
“Oh, I’m not selling anything,” the man laughs, a tad nervously. Faced with this Amazon of a woman bearing down on him with her bosom about on a level with his face and that hair – oh, that hair – he begins to doubt if this was such a bright idea after all.
“You’re not? Then what is it you’re after? We’re not interested in hell, nor brimstone,” she adds as a warning.
“Oh, God no, nothing like that. My name’s Webster, er, Ben Webster.” He gives her a hand to shake. She stares at it. “I, um,” sheepishly retracting the hand. “I’m a reporter. I work for the, the ah, Telescope,” he produces the latest copy for her to study. It is the same paper that Alfie recently sent on its happy way to the shredder. “I was passing by the other day, and I’m just fascinated by your mast. I was wondering if you’d allow me to, uh, write an article on it for next month’s press.”
Alfie appears at Titania’s side.
“You want to write an article about the Mast?”
“Yes, yes. There’s a lot of concern in the area about radiation, cancerous growths, mental health, that sort of thing.”
“There is?”
“Oh yes, yes. I’ve interviewed a number of local residents. But none of them have quite the same experience as you, living here, as it were, with the enemy, ha ha…” He quails beneath the ardent frowns of his audience.
“I’m really not sure if we’d like to comment,” Titania begins, but Alfie interjects.
“Do you promise to write something of more intellectual worth than the normal dribble they put in that thing?”
“I, uh…”
“I mean,” Alfie goes on, snatching the paper from Webster’s limp hand and pointing to the face on the front, “who the hell is Pete Doherty?”
“Well, I, uh, he’s a…”
“Why do I want to read about Pete Doherty? Why should I give a flying fuck about Pete Bleedin’ Doherty?”
“Well, that’s just the thing, Mr… Mr, Er,” Webster says, seeing his chance. “This’ll be a story that will be relevant to you. It’ll be about you. You’re right – no-one wants to read about Pete Doherty. But I think they’ll want to read about you, and,” he tips his head to the silver structure visible above the roof of the house, “that mast.”
Alfie looks Webster up and down for a moment. He must be in his late twenties, certainly no older, with a clean shaven face and a conservative hairdo gelled solid to protect against any errant gusts of wind. His knuckles are white where they grip the handle of the briefcase. The man is clearly terrified; terrified of them, terrified of the Mast, terrified of the whole wide world. Something within Alfie stirs, a sort of begrudging empathy – there was a time before he found this house and these people when he felt much the same way about things. He finds himself thinking, maybe the Mast can save this soul, too.
Titania sees him giving way, and pulls him inside.
“You’re not seriously considering it, are you?” she demands.
“What’s the harm? He’s hardly going to blow us wide open. He writes for the Telescope, for crying out loud. It hardly has a global readership.”
“I just don’t like being interrogated by strangers, is all,” she mutters. Just the other day she was stopped in the street and quizzed on her opinion of Pakistani Bear Baiters. “But don’t you think they should be locked up?! Miss, don’t you think they should be punished?!” the frantic little woman had hollered after her as she sped down the street as fast as her platform sandals would allow. Titania felt she was somehow betraying mankind that day, betraying morality, simply by not pledging £3 a month to the quest to bring these monsters to justice. As the woman’s frenetic pleas chased her down the street, passers-by turned to look, whispering to each other, “There goes one of those Pakistani Bear Baiters!”
Alfie looks her squarely in the eye. Even he has to angle his gaze upwards slightly in order to do so.
“Come on, pumpkin. I’ve got a good feeling about this. I think it’s important.”
She sighs deeply, bosom up, bosom down. “Alright.” Alfie grins and pats her on the arse. “But for Chrissake, we mustn't let him publish anything ignorant.”
__________________
Ice is forming on the tips of my wings.
Last edited by sierra alpha : 04-09-2007 at 03:39 PM.
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