NOT WITH PEOPLE
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Update - April 24th
This story feels sad and violent, like most of my stories seem to be, and I'm looking forward to finding out more about the main character.
I'm drawn to the structure of the living rooms, I love it when scenes like that emerge - I call them Loch Ness Monsters. When I was a kid I had a book all about the mythical creature and before I had the patience to read the black and white text, I would flick through the pages to the ones that were broken up somehow. Bullet points, lists, facts, pictures, some structure to draw me in.
I look for Loch Ness Monsters in all my stories.
RJ
This is a story about the time I left the house to be around people but not with people. People when they’re looking at the newspaper or at each other are comforting bean bags and people when they ask you to explain yourself are that bed you bought from a cheap website that time. The one that doesn’t feel quite right and your back hurts and you wonder if you’ll ever get used to it.
People when they’re holding each other at bus stops and on each others shoulders across the bridge and wishing the movie was over so they can look at each other again. Those people. They’re the first coffee in the morning after your senses have come back after a head cold and you open the curtains and the sun feels like the sun and you are a frozen flower. People when they make you feel small and then say it was just a joke are that bed you bought once from that cheap website that bursts into flames and burns your house down.
So I left the house to be around people but not with people.
Between the car park and the coffee shop there’s a department store and the department store has a fake cul-de-sac with wooden house fronts and upsell gardens and a walk-in catalogue of living rooms one after the other.
You can only see the first one through a fake window. You walk under the flimsy cardboard streetlight and over the plastic grass and there it is. A wooden portal into modern family life. You can breathe deep and smell the flowers from the vase on the coffee table reminding you that family can be slow and calm and you see the broken banisters from curious customers wondering what is upstairs reminding you that family can be chaos. The flowers are lilies today and they are replaced every day and that makes me smile and I wonder who does that. This is the room of flowers because there are flowers on the mantlepiece too. Under that, a flat screen TV and games console and pretend homework out on the dinner table with pens and exercise books and a fake spilled glass of water.
Past the room of flowers is the ice cream room. I call it that because it reminds me of every summer the ice cream van jingled to our house like an old cartoon where even the trees danced and the man inside was a 99 flake with sprinkles. He would have lived in a house like this. Polka dot curtains and colourful lampshades with see-through plastic stands and I don’t really know what jive music is but they had music playing that was as colourful and angular as the ice cream room.
I like the next room because it reminds me I’m nearly at my favourite room. This room is Julie Garland’s kitchen and it smells of freshly baked cookies in a way that almost smells of freshly baked cookies but reminds you of the early 90’s when they tried to make scratch and sniff TV a thing. Anyway it’s the only room with a mannequin and she’s dressed in a white blouse with a blue apron that makes her look like Dorothy and when I told my friend she looks like Julie Garland she laughed and told me that’s not her name it’s Judy but that’s now the name of this fake housewife offering up a homely kitchen for just $999 plus installation.
That’s my journey. Every day I’m not working. I drive to the car park by Madison and Cooper and make the short walk to the coffee shop past the cul-de-sac of rooms for sale. The room of flowers, the ice cream room, Julie Garland’s kitchen, and then my favourite room. The final room. The final room before the exit to the coffee shop and it’s the only room not for sale. This is the anxiety room. A chair with no purpose and a table with no placemats. A fireplace with no mantlepiece. A vase with no flowers and a door that leads to nowhere. The room is roped off with signs on every surface reading This is an arrangement area and not for customer use. In a store full of sink-in sofas and deep oak dining rooms and lavender diffusers, here is a room so unsettlingly lifeless and an off-grey that can’t even commit to being brown and the only room that tells you off for even looking at it. The anxiety room is my favourite room because it’s the only room that changes. Sometimes a clothes rail with curtain patterns against whiteboards and wallpaper samples and other days old coffee cups and someone left behind a walkie talkie after a staff meeting. That room is never allowed to be anything it has to be all things to everyone and we are soul mates me and the anxiety room.
After the anxiety room it was a jumble of sale rails and end of line items. Out of season overcoats, last year’s technology and then the exit. Across the street, past the fountain and into my people watching spot.
And it was in my favourite people watching spot that our story begins. Because it was in that spot that I first saw Albert Levels. Picture a hat rack in the most expensive bar in town. A tower of dark fabric. Not the dark of cheap whiteboard marker maths, the dusty dark of a hundred history lessons rubbed into old chalkboards. I guessed his age in a heartbeat. If he wasn’t 43 he was 42 and if he wasn’t a summer July August baby he was definitely a cosy winter jumper December Christmas tree and nothing in between. This wasn’t a maybe there will be flowers soon person this was there are flowers right now see how I bloom person.
Right in front of me in the queue, ordering what I would then hear him order every day.
Hello yes thank you.
I will have the Sumatra, extra hot, very little milk thank you, can I pay with cash.
Always with cash, always with permission. I fell in love before his coins hit the counter.
The next day. I got there a little later but I could still hear him order.
I will have the Sumatra, extra hot, very little milk thank you can I pay with cash.
When he said can I pay with cash he looked the barista in the eye,