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| MICHAEL HULME lives and works in Norwich, a small provincial town in the United Kingdom famous for its open market, its Norman Castle and its disturbingly high level of interbreeding. Michael's fiction has previously appeared in flashquake, Scrivener's Pen, and NetAuthor. He has recently taken the shockingly unoriginal step of "starting work on his first novel." |
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| price tags Drizzle hangs in the air like static, clinging to cobbled streets and tall, dour buildings all painted in Henry Ford watercolours. He moves amongst the huddled shadows and pauses before each illuminated window. Some are afire in scarlet light; in others, buttercup yellow bulbs shimmer against red curtain. In each window, motionless, a girl. Already a year. He lights a cigarette, cupping his hand around the flame. Too long. He plans to choose carefully. He's in no rush. Men queue on a stairwell further down the street, their heads bowed and anonymous. He continues walking, window to window. Paint flakes from the sills, and water from overflowing gutters slaps the concrete. Oriental girl, skinny legs, vague bruises. A bottle blonde smiling with pretty mouth, dead eyes. Brunette, tight-knit curls, naked shoulders. He stops, avoiding her stare. That one, he thinks. Looks real. Not some dirty fantasy, not sordid, not out of his league in the real world. She looks like the sort of woman you might see alone at the theatre. He pictures her whispering a joke across a dinner table, face dancing with mischief; he sees her smiling shyly in a cafe bar, flirting with glances, looking, looking away, looking back; standing in her underwear in a cluttered kitchen, hair unkempt, making tea in the early morning light. Now he's made her real. Too real. Too real for what he's come here for. When she'd stopped saying "I love you," he'd coped. When they slipped further down the slide, down, down to the very bottom where "ours" becomes "yours" and "mine," he'd listened and shrugged and helped her to pack. He'd helped her with those heavy boxes down three flights of iron stairs, and he'd gone out to fill the holes she'd left. Rugs, lamps, encyclopaedias, a television, credit card, done. Now, in the images he paints of the girl in the window, he sees what he's missing. It isn't so easy that money's the answer. He tries to calculate the price of hearing that first hesitant, sincere "I love you." The charge for waking each morning to find a familiar arm draped around his waist. The going rate for the buzz of hearing keys turning in the front door, that second before seeing their face. The price of ambling through autumn leaves, holding hands in a bitter wind, the price of comfortable silence. He turns away, walks proud through the damp towards the grey centre, the museums, the galleries. All he'll buy today is a cup of coffee. Maybe, at the next table of the smoky café bar he's seeking, a pretty girl will be sitting alone, staring out of the window, daydreaming. ### © 2004 Michael Hulme |
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