Rich

He woke up that morning thinking about what he’d been told when he first realised he’d got the same six numbers on his ticket as he was looking at on the television. “It won’t buy you happiness, you know,” his mum had said. He had found it to be somewhat uncalled for, really. Happiness was something to worry about later. Right then was the moment to be thinking about yachts and big houses and standing at blackjack tables with a gorgeous woman on each arm.

He didn’t speak to his mum these days, though, so it didn’t matter really. Instead he spent his time in his big house, sailing in his yacht, or standing at blackjack tables with a gorgeous woman on each arm. Different women every night, because he never allowed himself to get close to any of them. There wasn’t really any point, because he hadn’t been able to trust women before and he certainly couldn’t trust them now that he was a millionaire. They must have thought they’d get their claws into him for one thing and one thing only, it’s just that they were always out of his life the next day; they were right that they were there for one thing and one thing only, it just wasn’t the one thing they had in their own minds.

When he was feeling particularly mischievous, he’d pay the women at the end of the night, or the next morning. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” he’d say, and they’d huff and leave with the money. He imagined that one day one of them wouldn’t take the money, then he’d know that he had a keeper, but he probably wouldn’t keep her anyway. How could he trust her? If she was just being clever it could easily be a double bluff. Make him think she wasn’t interested in the money to get at his money.

He worried about things like this because he didn’t have anything else to worry about. Most people spent their lives worrying about money, but he didn’t need to, and he had to fill the void with something. He had considered developing hypochondria, figuring that that would give him plenty to worry about, especially if he watched the right television programmes or read the right books and magazines. He couldn’t really carry it through, though, he didn’t want to spend his time making trips to the doctor every other day complaining of some new ailment when he could be spending his time watching television and reading books and magazines, and looking for a woman to spend the next night with.

He didn’t even have to worry about that, because he never seemed to run out. He’d go out on an evening and his wealth would give him an aura of some kind, as if these women could sense it and gravitated towards him without even knowing why.

It’s just that they were always the wrong kind of women, and the women that weren’t peculiarly attracted to him just never made themselves known.

Cracking

They drove there in silence because silence was everything they’d known for the last year of their marriage. Mostly it was a total silence, a void, an emptiness between them that neither of them cared enough to bridge. When there wasn’t silence, there was apathy. Simple requests responded to in the simplest possible terms. Questions were phrased to generate a yes or no answer. Answers were given as “yes,” or “no.” Neither made any effort to go beyond that because in the past, anything beyond that had been shouting. The shouting was the worst, and the apathy was worth it in comparison.

It couldn’t go on forever. It couldn’t be allowed to.

“Let’s go for a drive,” he said.

“No,” she replied.

“Please,” he said.

“Okay,” she said, almost in surprise that he’d pushed her and in surprise that she’d agreed to it.

He drove her to the lake where they’d gone for their first date. It had frozen over and it was freezing cold out there that night, but he didn’t have a fonder memory of their time together. The way she held on to him as they were walking towards the ice. The look on her face when she saw a blanket lying on the ice surrounded by candles. The laughter when he told her that it wasn’t enough to melt the ice and she had no need to worry. Her worry that came through anyway, and the way she didn’t let go of his hand once all night. The way they talked, because they used to do that back then. The way she liked him. The way he fell in love with her. The way neither of them wanted to leave and so they didn’t, staying there until the sun rose and shone on the ice and blinded them with its light. Even the way they didn’t see each other for a week afterwards as they recovered from separate bouts of flu, it all felt worth it anyway.

Today they arrived there and she said the same words she’d said when they arrived there before. “What are we doing here.” They were different, though. Last time they were tinged with curiosity, this time they were accusatory, as if he was up to something.

“It was six years ago today we came here. Do you remember?”

“Yes.”

“Come on.”

He took her hand and she pulled it away, so he didn’t try a second time. He walked ahead and she followed, but stopped a few steps later.

“I want to go home.”

“Why?”

“This isn’t right.”

“Please.”

She let herself be fooled by it again. Something inside her wanted to be fooled by it, and so she walked behind him on to the ice. It was just like she remembered it the last time, or at least some of it was. The feelings of fear were still there, but it didn’t feel like a beginning any more, no matter how hard they tried they wouldn’t be able to start again.

Mall

It was going to be a disaster from the very first moment we agreed to go out. I’d met her on a dating website and we’d got on pretty well, but then we decided to meet and she said this:

“How about we meet at the mall?” The mall. The mall. In fucking Folkestone.

“The mall?”

“Yeah.”

“The shopping centre?”

“That’s what I said.”

That wasn’t what she said, but it didn’t seem like it was worth explaining to her why that wasn’t what she said, because that was the moment a loud alarm should have started going off and a huge red sign with the words “ABORT, ABORT” on it should have started flashing. I should have made my excuses. “Actually the shopping centre’s no good,” I should have said. “I’m banned from there for. . . reasons.”

“What reasons?” she’d have asked me, and I wouldn’t have told her. I’d say it was private and she’d instantly assume I’d done some kind of sexual assault or something because that’s where people’s minds tend to go straight away these days, isn’t it? It’d have the desired effect, though. Either she’d suddenly get “sick” or something and decide we couldn’t go out with each other, or she’d let bygones be bygones and we still meet up but at that point it would have to be somewhere else. At that point the “ABORT” alarm would probably explode in overuse because if she’s totally fine with going out with a sexual predator what on earth is wrong with her?

Anyway, none of that happened, because despite the alarm bells in my head I said: “okay, let’s meet at the mall. Four on Saturday?”

I hated myself instantly, for just about everything that I’d just said. I’d used the word “mall” despite spending 0.0% of my life within 3,000 miles of the United States. I’d actually agreed to go on a date at the mall, even though I was a 34 year old man rather than a thirteen year old boy. And then, worst of all, and for reasons that I still couldn’t work out, I’d suggested four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. Yeah, that would be fun, I’d meet her there when all the people for whom a day at a shopping centre is actually a proper date would be there. Those aforementioned thirteen year old boys. What on earth were we going to do at a shopping centre at four on a Saturday? We could look for some shoes. Maybe buy the latest Beyonce album or whatever it looks like would impress her. Then what? Dinner? At half past four? Should I be suggesting McDonald’s for that, just to complete the “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing” theme? Luckily, there was still an out. She’d see how absurd an idea it was and suggest meeting later, sometime around seven or eight when we could go dinner somewhere nice.

“Four sounds great,” she said. Of course she did. This was a woman that suggested we have a date at a mall.

ABORT. ABORT.

And so along I went.

Bone

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

They hadn’t seen anything like it before. It looked almost like a stone, but it was too long for that, it was too thin. And it was too white, too. Not a bright kind of white but still more white than they’d expect a stone to be. It wasn’t a stone.

“What is it, then?”

“I just said I don’t know.”

The two of them lived next door to one another and they’d been playing in the woods over the road behind their houses. They did it every day, each dare each one dared the other to go further and further into the forest until one of them lost their nerve and they turned back. Today, both of them felt braver than ever. It could have been the sunny weather. It could have been the fact that it was pocket money day and they felt like the world was at their feet. Either way, they kept walking and walking, and soon began to wonder whether they would come out of the other side of the wood before turning back. If it had an other side at all.

That’s when they’d come to it.

A river, or a stream even, that flowed across their path. Suddenly it became light as the sun was no longer so hidden by the trees, and they could look left and right along the river for what seemed like forever.

“What do we do now?”

“I don’t know.”

There wasn’t any way across the river, or at least there wasn’t a way across that wouldn’t have got them wet. It didn’t look very deep but it would certainly be at least at knee height and then they’d be trudging on the rest of the way with wet jeans. If they ever dried, they’d just have to get them wet again when they came back past.

“I think we should go back, I guess.”

“What, you’re chicken?”

It was like kryptonite. All of a sudden neither of them could fathom going back, and neither of them wanted to go on, either. They were stuck here and so just sat on the side of the river and hoped that the other would give in first so that they’d be able to go home, it would be time for dinner soon and if they didn’t hurry the shop would almost certainly be closed when they ran there, too.

Neither of them gave in, and instead looked around for something to entertain themselves. That’s when he’d picked it up from the side of him. It must have been there all along but all of a sudden it was as if it had thrust itself into his hands. He wiped some mud from it and held it up to get a better look in the light.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

Eventually they’d discover that it was a forearm, and they’d wonder how it had ended up there. So would a lot of people.

Authentication

“Please enter your name,” spoke the machine to the left of the door, and so the man spoke his name.

“01444552,” he said.

“01444552,” the machine spoke back slowly, and then there followed a series of three long beeps before a fourth in a higher pitch signalled that the door was unlocking and with a click and a hiss, it slid to the left and his passage was granted.

He walked through the door and pressed a green button on the other side to close it behind him and when it was closed he was out of sight forever.

He’d watched all this from behind the man and thought he had some idea how he’d be able to get inside, but there was only really one way to find out, so he took two steps forwards and pressed the green button on the machine.

The machine, such as it could even be called that, was really a square topped pole-like contraption about three feet tall which housed a keypad on its top face which had the number zero to nine, and green button. There was no button to cancel as people weren’t expected to make mistakes. Should one make a mistake, it had to be committed to with the green button whereupon they would be advised that they’d made a mistake and that someone would be out to deal with them shortly. Usually it was all sorted out when a human got involved, the mistake could be explained and they’d be punished for it with the utmost leniency. Nobody went unpunished, though, because if people thought they could get away with making mistakes then people wouldn’t try so hard not to make them. There were stories of people that had tried to fool the system, these were not punished so leniently. It was a little known fact that the keys on the keypad had fingerprint recognition built in to them. Should you enter the wrong code it would still register your identity and if you were to try and enter the code correctly a second time, you would be found guilty of fraud. This applied as much to the people that had been cleared to use the voice activated portion of the entry machine, though these people didn’t tend to speak their own names incorrectly and so it was rare for one of them to be denied entry in this manner.

In fact, there was only one recorded case. A man from Area BBK had been distracted when speaking his name and missed a middle character. He had assumed that since the machine had searched for “0064884” he would be clear to enter under his actual name of “00648824” as the machine would recognise him as a different person. He was wrong. The confirmation of the name is merely to match the voice to the given identity, and even speaking the name wrong still gives you away. The case was recorded, that there was a punishment was recorded, what the punishment was remains a mystery even now.

Crawl

He opened his eyes and tried to focus on the ceiling in front of him but the light shining through the windows at his left (that always used to be on his right) just made his eyes water and he couldn’t focus on anything. He closed his eyes again and clenched them tight to ease the stinging feeling. He groaned as he remembered last night and then groaned again when his stomach started to remind him of last night as well, just in case he had dared to forget it.

He opened his eyes a second time through the pain but not far enough that he could actually focus on anything. Just far enough to see the general shapes of his surroundings so that he didn’t walk into any door frames on the way to the bathroom. He rolled over twice to get to the edge of the bed and sit up, but instead found that he rolled out of bed and landed on the wooden floor with a thud. He wondered where his carpet was but there was no time for that, he had to get to the bathroom. He pulled himself up as far as his knees and doubled over with the sickness in his stomach and didn’t dare stand up any further. He crawled on his hand and knees to the bedroom door which he was sure had moved from where it was yesterday, and that’s when he was asked what he was doing.

“What are you doing?” came the voice from behind him. There definitely wasn’t meant to be a voice.

“Bathroom,” he said.

“Oh,” came the voice. “It’s just along the hall to the left,” it said. He knew where his bathroom was, he didn’t need to be told. Maybe it was his conscience talking. Then he realised that his bathroom wasn’t along the hall to the left at all, it was directly opposite his bedroom door. Then he realised that he didn’t actually have any idea at all where he was, and his memories of last night had stopped far short of him actually coming home, or wherever he’d actually ended up. He did the only thing he could think to do, he crawled out of the room, turned left, and crawled along the hall until he reached the bathroom which wasn’t his own bathroom but was definitely a bathroom that belonged to somebody.

He closed the door behind himself, locked it, and gradually started to adjust to the light while he was throwing up in the toilet. When he felt almost reasonable, he sat on the side of the bath and wondered what to do next. He found it hard to know what to do next when he had no idea where he was or who it was that had been speaking to him. He must have pulled, but he didn’t remember talking to anyone.

“I thought you were trying to get away,” came the voice from outside the bathroom door, and then came some laughter.

He had no idea what it meant.

Poisoning

“How about a drink?” she said, putting the tip of her finger on his lips and staring into his eyes. She felt his mouth curve into a smile and he nodded rather than open his mouth and lose this contact between them. This was only the beginning, he thought, the contact could only grow from here.

She removed her finger from his lips and quickly spun around so that her long white skirt whirled around her. She reached her arm behind her without looking and he put his hand in hers. She walked forward to her front door and he followed as she went inside.

As soon as the door was closed, he took her other hand and leaned her against the wall and leant in to kiss her. “Wait,” she said. “Drinks.”

“Drinks can wait,” he said.

“I’m thirsty.”

He wanted to stay here, this closeness to a woman wasn’t something he had often and right now he could feel her breath on his neck. It was warm. It was soft. He wanted to stay here but at least if he kept her happy he’d be able to come back here, and that was the next best thing.

“Drinks,” he said, and he smiled. She smiled back and led him through to the kitchen and discarded his hand in the direction of a chair that was next to the back door.

“Sit,” she said, but her message had already got through and he was already walking over to the chair to sit. “Coffee?” she said.

He found it amusing. Coffee was supposed to be a euphemism. He had thought that “how about a drink?” was a euphemism too which was why he’d made a move as soon as they were inside, before he’d discovered that all she wanted was a drink. All she’d wanted then, anyway, the night was young. Now he was being offered coffee and it didn’t mean anything other than that he’d get a drink of coffee.

“You’re a difficult one to read, you know that?” he said.

“What?” she said, turning around to face him and leaning her head slightly to the side.

“Sorry,” he said. “Doesn’t matter. Coffee would be lovely. Lovely like you,” with a little too much emphasis on the “you.”

“That’s not what you said.”

“I know, I was just being silly, ignore me.”

“Okay,” she said, and she turned around again to face the kettle. He found himself unable to read her again. She was either playing with him and she’d turn around in a second and laugh, or she was genuinely mad, or even upset, by what he’d said, and she was actually going to ignore him. It wouldn’t be the easiest thing for her to do in her own home and so it couldn’t possibly be that, and yet here he found himself sitting in her kitchen, her back turned, and he had no idea what to do.

Soon, he knew, as she smiled at him and walked over with two cups of coffee in her hands.

To Discover

“And so I opened the door, only to discover that she was there with-”

“Wait.”

“What?”

“You opened the door to discover her?”

“Yes?”

“So you already knew what was going to be there?”

“What?”

“Well if you opened the door to discover something, you must have known there was something to discover, otherwise you wouldn’t have been there trying to discover it.”

“I wasn’t trying to discover anything.”

“You said you opened the door to discover it.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“What did you mean?”

“So I opened the door, AND discovered her there with Martin.”

“Where?”

“In the library. In our fucking bed, of course.”

“Right, right, I’m with you. What then?”

What then should really have been kept as a secret. What then was that he’d grabbed the baseball bat he kept beside the bed to ward off possible burglars and raised it high above his head, pointing behind him then but somehow still pointing very much at Martin. Martin had seen this and panicked and ran, as naked as the day he was born, to the window and climbed out of it. From there, he didn’t really have anywhere to go and that he would slip and fall in his bare feet was perhaps as inevitable as the fact that he’d been sleeping with his wife. There was a scream that can’t be described as anything other than “pathetic” as he disappeared from view and his wife probably screamed then louder than Martin had. He told her to shut up and went over to the window to see Martin slightly the worse for the one-storey fall, but not with anything that looking like it’d be lasting damage. He was limping away from the house in no specific direction, and at a speed that suggested he could be easily caught.

He decided to g and catch him. “Stay here,” he said to his wife.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Something I should have done a long time ago,” he said, and he left the room.

He heard her shout “what does that even mean?” from the bedroom but he didn’t have time to worry about what it meant. It had sounded good, and that’s what was important.

He opened the front door and Martin turned to look at him and tried to increase his pace but his left ankle was clearly broken and he couldn’t move quickly. He decided not to pursue him quickly either. He’d always heard about the thrill of the chase but never really understood what it meant until now. What it meant was that what Martin was going through now, the fear, the not knowing what was going to happen to him was actually more fun and more long-lasting than what would happen when he caught him.

He didn’t even know what he was going to do when he caught him. In the end it was the police that caught him, and in a way that was even better. All the thrill of the chase and none of the worry about what to do next, just the knowledge that the chase for Martin was still just beginning.

Teamwork

If the idea was to promote teamwork, why were we separated into “them and us?” What kind of teamwork was that? That was the kind of teamwork that says that while you may be a team, you still don’t matter to us. Teamwork, fine. Togetherness, no thanks.

To tell the truth, it wasn’t even like we were working as a team. I can’t work out what the benefits were at all.

When Clive originally revealed the plan he did it to a chorus of groans.

“We’re going paintballing,” he said.

“Groan,” we said.

“Paintballing?” I said.

“Yes, it’s a team building exercise, and it’s compulsory.”

Ah, compulsory. If ever a word was so perfect at removing any hope of fun and enjoyment from an experience it was compulsory. Maybe we’d have enjoyed paintball if it felt like we had a choice. “Hey, free paintball,” we’d had said. “That could be pretty fun.”

“I don’t want to play paintball,” we said instead.

“It’s compulsory,” said Clive, and then the meeting ended.

Two Sundays later we found ourselves on a bus to Walling Forest where we were due to meet with some bloke who’d kit us out with guns and goggles and send us out to shoot at each other.

Clive stood at the front of the bus in some army fatigues that probably made him feel like a soldier, but the desert camouflage he’d for some reason chosen wouldn’t serve him particularly well in the forest. His clothes looked so new that he can’t have had the time to send them back and ask for a smaller size, too, and he looked like a kid playing in daddy’s army clothes. Or “ridiculous” as Mary so eloquently put it.

“Right, this little junket” oh God, he said junket, “is all about teamwork and so you’ll all be working together against us.”

By “us,” he meant management. Or “management,” that term that describes people who are more important than the rest of us. By referring to himself as management it meant that he didn’t have to refer to us as “proles,” he could just not refer to us with any term at all. It turned out that as well as that bloke kitting us out with guns, senior management would be there waiting to take us on too. “Senior management” was another euphemism for people that didn’t feel like they were important enough if they were just called “management.” To them, management were the proles and God only knows what we were. They must have been coming to shoot us for the same reason that the rich shoot foxes, for that feeling of power over a weaker specimen. They probably hadn’t even considered that these foxes might be shooting back at them.

“Now I want you to be careful,” Clive went on, “not to shoot any of the senior management.”

Apparently we wouldn’t be working as a team to try and take the other team down, we’d be working as a team to manoeuvre each other into positions in which we’d be shot.

To say we were having fun already would be a complete fabrication.

Three

In the distance she could still hear the alarms, and was convinced that she could hear the footsteps that went along with them. Were they just her footsteps? It would be impossible to tell unless she stopped, but if she stopped they would catch her and so she kept running. Her own footsteps were soft in the mud and almost quiet but for the cracking of sticks that she stepped on that had fallen from the tall trees that were shielding her from the sunlight and from any air craft that might have been in pursuit. She couldn’t hear such a thing though, and assumed that were it there, it would drown out her own footsteps.

She’d been running for almost an hour when she came to the house, and she slowed down to evaluate the situation. It allowed her a moment to listen to what was around her and she heard nothing out of the ordinary. Somewhere nearby was running water, the sound of a river crashing onto some rocks. Birds were singing to each other in the trees. There was a light wind that was swirling high above in the tops of the trees and making the leaves dance with each other. Aside from that, there was nothing. She heard nobody approaching either at speed or otherwise and suddenly she found that she could breathe easily again.

The house was more of a cottage, really. It looked as though it had been built by someone that had built it as a first attempt. It was messy, for want of a better word, but at the same time set in amongst the trees it was beautiful. It seemed like it was constructed from the wood of trees that had once occupied this clearing in the forest and as a result was almost invisible. The roof was thatched but then had a covering of evergreen leaves on the top of it as another attempt to disguise it, or to allow it to blend in.

She walked up to the front door and found it ajar. There was nothing in this forest for anyone and no one in this forest for anything and so the owner probably didn’t see the point in locking the door when he went out. She knocked twice on the door, hard enough that she pushed the door open ever more slightly so that she could look inside.

Inside was no better constructed than the outside. A staircase in particular stood out. Firstly because it was made with logs which had just been cut in half lengthways to make flat steps, and secondly because from the outside the house hadn’t appeared to have a second storey.

She hadn’t received a response and so she knocked a third time, and shouted “hello” into the ever-widening entrance into this person’s home. After thirty seconds more without getting any answer, she walked in and closed the door behind herself and hooked it shut. From the hallway, she walked straight ahead into the kitchen.