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Short stories from The Vicious Circle

The Smell of Lonely

The Whistler Writers Group, also known as The Vicious Circle, will be presenting the Whistler Writers Festival Nov. 3-14, 2004. The festival is designed for writers and readers, with a smorgasbord of creative events, including: discussions with and readings by award-winning West Coast authors; a workshop to inspire new writers; and an intensive workshop for emerging writers on craft and the publishing industry. A schedule of events is available through Stella Harvey at Stella25@telus.net or by calling her at 604-932-4518.

The Smell of Lonely is the second of four short stories written by members of the Vicious Circle that will run in Pique Newsmagazine from Oct. 15 to Nov. Nov. 5. These stories are part of a collection of stories by local writers that will be released at the festival. The journal, appropriately called The Vicious Circle, will be available for sale at the festival for $5. Enjoy the stories! And check out the various events open to the public at the Whistler Writers Festival.

The Smell of Lonely

-1-

My brother Ben and I are thinking about buying into a sharehouse with Solomon.

What I know about Solly is this:

1. He’s a classic anal retentive.

(Ben, my brother, used to sneak into his room in residence and move his pens and his colour-coded noticeboard pins around, just to provoke his irrational angst. Solly has an aversion to public washrooms. We’ve gone on road trips with Solly, and he has managed to not shit for several days until he can return to the comforts of his own lavatory. Which I have used, and honestly, it’s not worth holding out for.)

2. He’s a bachelor bachelor.

(Solly sleeps with his cat, doesn’t go on dates and seems oblivious to the cues that signal a positive female interaction.)

3. He’ll never buy a house of his own in this market.

(Be it the Olympic death-knell to affordable housing, the unrevivable stock market, or a frenzy of baby boomers beefing up their portfolios, the market is bullishly pawing at the ground and snorting in contempt at working thirty-somethings looking to gain entry. Ben and I would be stretched so thin we’d be transparent and our folks are good for the deposit. The house we’ve formed an attachment to (the first trap for young players is emotionally connecting with a chunk of real estate) is a swanky pad with ocean views and a wrap-around deck in a bourgeois neighbourhood that holds community dances. To a socialist like me, buying in feels like selling out, so sharehousing with a potsmoking anally-retentive bachelor and my gay brother is suitably subversive that I can sleep at night.)

The place is big enough to share, to contain all our orbits with the minimum of interjection from air traffic control. I imagine a Warholesque diagram of the house, of our dance steps, traffic pathways. A little funky two-step now and then at the fridge, sorry, you go, after you… the occasional bottleneck at the stereo, or the hammock. But the danger zone would be the bathroom.

Immaculately retro and in dire need of a renovation, I imagine the complex ritualized steps of approach, avoidance, of sharing that single bathroom. The exploratory foray – has anyone been in here lately? The sniff about. Anyone looking drawn in this direction? The vanishing – door close, descent into the private doings and undoings. Then, the furtive escape – the code of fan still whirring, like a note in a cigarette tin under a cairn, I was here, beware, beyond this place there be monsters.

-2-

Ben is doing the calculations, crunching the numbers, grinding his teeth – the debt-juggling act. I am remembering what I learned from earlier cooperative living experiments. Here’s what I know about Felix:

1. Millionaire father paid off his credit card monthly.

2. Drinking problem.

3. I should never have slept with him.

He got stabbed the year I was living with him. We were three guys and three girls sharing a creaky draughty sharehouse. No couples. One fuck that no one talked about.

Sal drew the short straw and had to share a room with Felix. He pissed in her bureau one night. A 3 a.m. shadow, staggering to the corner of the bedroom, pulling out the bottom drawer as if some po-mo designer had invented the new stealth-toilet. He pissed through all her clothes. And stumbled back to bed.

A few weeks later he was stabbed. (Not by Sal.) Beerily belligerent, the lean hipped boyman with a drinking problem and a trust-fund, taking on a country town’s football team, and they followed him as he walked home and left him, for his audacity, blood-cloaked and blade-stuck. He kept walking home, knocked on the door at 3 a.m., having lost/forgotten his key. A woodpecker at my dreams.

Sleep-funked, I stumbled down the stairs. The house reverberated sound like an auditorium.

Opened the door to a night-ghoul, swaying slightly, as though he’d staggered from an accident scene.

"What the hell happened to you?"

He smiled. Unable to speak. Shrugged. Wanting the words, the scrutiny, the searing at his stuck-gut, all to slide over him. Wanting to sleep it off.

"Fuck. Are you okay? Do you need to go to the hospital?"

I was whispering, but Nathan came down, fully dressed. He’d been lying in bed, listening through the parchment walls, waiting. He’d heard the knocking but knew someone else would expose their toes to the frigid linoleum first. When he realized it was a crisis and not one of his housemates’ drunken lovers, he swooped down to save the day with his preternatural cool. Bundled me out of the way. Bundled Felix off to the clinic, I think. Stitches, maybe. I don’t really remember.

What I remember most about that sharehouse was the toilet. Sharing that single toilet and the sheer transparency of the walls. I’d hear when my roommate’s breathing shifted. I listened to Sal sobbing for her grandfather into a midnight pillow. I’d hear Mitch get up at 6 a.m. ever morning, his uneven gait across the floor, down the stairs to the toilet. I’d hear the flush. The window sliding open, signaling satisfactory completion of his morning dump, so the air could penetrate, soften the blow. Lying in bed, my bladder urging me up, out of warm cocoon into the breath-fogging house, I’d hear the slide of that single pane of glass and know I’d have to hold on a little longer and let the fumes clear.

-3-

I became a smoker that year. I didn’t actually buy a packet of smokes myself. Didn’t need to. One of a handful of girls in a pub full of men. Kegs changed in the subterranean din of the basement, the clicking conversation of snooker balls, the entire room a cloud of blue. Sting at my eyes, my hair always smelling of the night before.

One quiet night, mid-week, I was perched at a high table with my partners in crime, Scott and Andy, a fresh round always promptly supplied, a packet of cigarettes of no particular alliance keeping all our fingers busy. Three of us, drinking, inhaling, posing. Deep in conversation and it was all about sex. How was I supposed to know?

"My perfect girl…" Andy riffed, squinting against the smoke as he drew it in. I tilted my head, archly, wielding cigarette like a forties film siren. Here was the decoder ring to the heart of the hero. Here – insight from the gods own mouth. Andy, my secret crush, my Clark-Kent-lookalike. "My perfect girl…"

But I knew that Andy’s perfect girl wore nail polish, pearl chokers, cashmere. She had perfect teeth and coordinated her belt, shoes and handbag. I knew this and yet was still fool enough to imagine him putting the cigarette down, leaning forward, intense, revelatory, and saying, "My perfect girl knows her own mind." Or: "She can keep up with the boys." Or even: "She makes me a better person because she won’t let me push her around." Then the music would swell, zoom in on two heads angling in together, for the culmination, crescendo, climax…

"My perfect girl," Andy riffed through a haze of smoke,

(Yes? Yes?)

"…doesn’t go to the toilet."

But of course.

I had been going to the toilet all night. Pissing like a horse because of the inordinate amount of beer I was drinking, and which I was now slamming back with a sudden thirst for obliteration. Not to mention the fact that I sometimes dripped on the seat. Further considered my sins: I fart. Shit. Bleed. The works.

I would never be loved.

-4-

Ben and I lowball the offer on the fancy house. Are relieved when it’s flatly rejected, without any counters. Two months later, Solly, with a loan from his dad and proceeds from a bumper crop, closes on a place of his own. A modest trailer, clean, room for a grow-op to pay the mortgage down.

We sit around his living room, warming house. Injecting new energy. The kitchen and entrance are still a storage hoard of unpacked boxes. The cupboards remain empty, smelling of cleaning fluid, of closed in space, of someone else. The stereo has been unpacked. Solly has fussed for hours over where to locate the surround sound speakers, the sub-woofer. He’s covered the couch with a throw rug, just so.

The cd rack took some time – alphabetization? chronological arrangement? The kitchen daunts him – should the spices and pantry be arranged alphabetically, thematically, or by bottle/container size? Pasta sauce. Kraft dinner. Energy bars. Cereal boxes. Alphabetize the spices. Yes.

All this order. Keeping it under control. The semblance of control. The silk screen of lies. I’m fine. I’m fine. When all along, we know that deep inside, we are putrid. We are inherently unloveable.

"No regrets?" I ask him, over beer, bags of chips. "No buyer’s remorse?"

"Oh. A little. It’s a lot to do by yourself. If I had a partner…" He lets the thought trail away. I nod. When you’re 32 years old and finally buy a house, alone, you are surrendering to your singledom. You are releasing the dream of househunting with a beloved. Like a clutch of balloons your hand’s no longer holding.

I nod at Solly, he lets the thought go, concentrates on rolling a joint. I know what you mean.

In her Whistler life, Lisa Richardson has lived in a fourteen-person sharehouse, a wardrobe, an Airstream trailer and a converted church. She recently won the Pique's Tales of Mountain Life competition, and is working on her memoir, Confessions of a Dirtbag .