There’s a loaded literary playfulness in introducing a story of youthful self-actualisation with a singular, pedigree memory. For Fisher Price, it was an elegantly tragic moment that claimed control of his life, this red glorious summer: today, staggering into his studio apartment with staccato footfalls, to witness his girlfriend of nineteen months having sex with someone else. It came as all mortal wounds do, fist-fast and savage, and left its slow-burning chrysanthemum image in the wretched and baleful centre of his mind, there to play on continual loop, like a pop song that loses its flavour while you listen to it. Moments like these are akin to extraterrestrial infection, a microscopic war being battled out for the sovereignty of your sanity, so that you can only stand silent, and watch for one minute—two—before the pulpy churned contents of your stomach flames up your throat and out. Fisher clutched his vomit-soaked sternum with the fluttering palms of his hands, nauseous with strange feelings of drowning and detachment, and then exited with all the cultivated politeness he could muster, shutting the door and turning the sign over as he clutched its familiar brass knob. The sign now read: PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB. For Fisher, it was a belated sentiment.
Occasionally, while contributing to the greater cosmic farce, other moments will fall into place, too, sweet and sweet-burning moments, and cliches will become the vocabulary for adventure again, and photographs will be captured without there ever being a camera. And these, too, are just as real, and just as likely. Still, Fisher felt himself become old and distorted with unfathomable speed, tasting tears that bled from the woolly corners of his eyes, each one being expelled from his pores as though fat and lethargic maggots, warping the sunset before him into ribbons of sideshow colour. He blinked away tears, shackled horrific sobs, glared hard at the melancholy firework of sun and sky, and listened to the black glass of the ocean seethe and seduce. It was mid-morning and a cigarette trembled between intrepid teeth. Fisher studied the intricate patterning of his palms, his body hunched low, heart blue like cooling agate. He felt boring, uninspired, a plane banking sharply into hard ground, unapologetic apocalypse, a nobody boy with nobody’s joy. He wanted to die, and he wanted this to be spectacular and new, such a profound revelation, an existential epiphany that would mark him off as an individual, fill him with a sense of value, make him out to be the channel through which unimagined darkness flows and cascades. But no!—everyone has wanted to die, most everyone has lost in love, and half these people have had their partner betray the serenity and integrity of the heart somehow, by fucking the takeaway boy on the living room wine-rack with delicious abandon. Yes. He was but a moment, himself, a particle of singularity and of insignificant design, just forgotten sand lost in the jagged sweep of wind cleaving over the sugarwhite coast. No-one would remember Fisher Price. No-one would remember the sorrow that brooded in the nicotine of his breath.
Other moments do fall into place, too, though. Occasionally.
A girl interrupted his reverie and the suicidal smoke kissing his hunched form. He ground out his ciggy. She sat beside him, smelling like the best scented thing you could ever waste a prayer upon, and smiled. A feeling so hot and alive cut through his weepy chest, and he sat reeling from the thunderstorm resurrection of his old and distorted heart. His insides were alive with new blood, strawberries, and soft giggles. Oh, adore: Fisher Price had been dumped and had fallen for someone else entirely within the space of a single cigarette.
‘Hi,’ she said.
‘Talk to me,’ she said.
Fisher, svelte and lithe and evasive as an untamed swallow, avoided immediate thigh-to-thigh contact with the girl, his heroine, by wriggling to the furthermost end of the bench. He immediately contemplated the knees beneath his sickly faded jeans, purple and taut like choke, and maintained his holy vigil, for fear of dropping the sabre of sobriety, for fear he might serenade this lovely lady with unsubtle thoughts: that she was bewitching, that she was his favourite new person, that she burned the air with angel perfumery. He puzzled over the spidery system of veins and nerves marking the fabric of his Levis, a tapestry of tiny thunderstorms, and then looked up—further reverence would corrupt their relationship. He wanted to be her guy. Yes. He would prove to her his worth.
‘My name’s Kate,’ said Kate, inching closer and exchanging knowing glances with Fisher through the impenetrable and unruly canopy of a platinum blonde fringe. He turned his head, espying the fleeting haunches of a sensual jungle cat through this network of fronds. She blew an updraft plume of oxygen with her scarlet lower lip, red as the minuscule corona of blood in the milk-white of a fingernail, and the tiny gust disrupted the prolonged effect of there existing a heart of sullen darkness enshrouding her eyes; her fringe rose and rearranged itself in the attention provided by that distortion of upward air, and Fisher was decreed the dignity of meeting the blaze of her gaze, two eyes as sharp and green as hemispheres enthralled by the paranormal glow of St. Elmo’s fire. He felt a hand, small and sunny, foisted into his own, and it squeezed the taut flesh clustered about the joints of his knuckles with a fury that suggested nothing alternative to tremulous and triumphant orgasm. ‘My name’s Kate, boy, and I’m fifteen.’
Fisher spun away; here he was, broncobuster and laureate, breaker of hearts and hymens, awash and ensnared in a personal hurricane of idiot confusion, a hack writer come unstuck in time, a dead metaphor man, a gangling monstrosity of twenty-three, composed of the limb and ligament of a daddy longlegs, feeling a single revelation before him, like a proud bison: Fisher was fourteen again.
‘Hey Kate,’ he grinned, tears curling like precious stalactites from the curvature of his quivering eyelashes, ‘I’m Fisher. I’m an old fart who should be wearing a hounds-tooth tracksuit.’
She liked that. She laughed and stars that couldn’t be seen wheeled and somersaulted. Fisher realised he hadn’t released her hand. He did so. Kate surveyed him critically, with a tongue juxtaposed between her butchering smirk. ‘You look like you forgot some colours, boy with the half-name of a fridge. I want to teach you.’
The arsenal of gloom and the inventory of sarcasm buckled open, creaking wide within the apple of his abdomen, and Fisher narrowed his eye, and so too his acceptance. ‘Teach me?’ He blanched minutely beneath the beam of the bleary sun. ‘Kate, see, you don’t understand—’
‘Stop being old like the arsehole in your future mirror, and take one second, one second, boy, to see that you’re dwelling in smoke when there exists so much summer. It’s palpable, yeah? That’s the right word, yeah?’
Fisher felt her hand, smooth as a river stone and without discomfort, slide back into his.
‘I was only going to ask: what do you wish to teach me?’
She stood up, her body a particle explosion of unapologetic originality. ‘This is a wetsuit, boy fish.’ Kate laughed, laughed without a scintilla of reservation at Fisher Price with her arched back, and through her swimmy stare. ‘I can teach you the thing that is called surfing, doofus.’
He found levity, then, this boy with the half-name of a fridge.
