The Evening Wore On

So I once took a creative writing paper at uni to pass the time between happy hours (ah English 344, you were the best thing in my day right before the bars would open). As a result, I sometimes do write a bit of fiction now and then. I was working on a novel off and on these last two months with the working title "The Evening Wore On" but for reasons I'm not going to go into here, things happened which made the planned storyline of this book just a little too painful for me to keep writing about. However, I'm happy with the first draft of the first three chapters, and though the project will probably never be finished now, it'd be a shame if they never saw the light of day.

Chapter I

“I understand you're hurting right now”.

“I am in unimaginable pain right now- but if you really must try and understand, walk over to that empty power socket on the wall and insert a genital into it. That should be a good indicator as to where I'm at right now”.

“Peleg”.

Here are the major players of this scene. First, there was me, the recently dumped nineteen-year-old from Grey Lynn, Auckland. The second was my sidekick, Adam Eugene Mikkelson, who had chaperoned me the thirty-nine step pilgrimage from the student lounge to the student bar. The third was some unknown bystander who was staring at his jug of beer with an existentialist intensity. The third guy is irrelevant to this story, other than that he was in our corner booth and even though all other booths were empty, there was no power on this earth that would allow Adam and me to take another.

Adam held his Scotch to his mouth. “What did she actually say?”

“She said that she felt lonely, and I wasn't there for her. She said that she felt trapped in a commitment, and she didn't trust me. She said that something had felt off for ages, and she didn't know how to fix us. She said that we should break up now so we can both have the summer to heal. She said it wasn't meant to be”.

“She said all that?”

“She said it with a look”.

Adam downed his Scotch and raised his beer chaser. “To the end of Miley Portus”.

We drank. Not as much as our newfound mate who was nearer the end of his life than the beginning of it, but we drank. Adam took his e-cigarette from his pocket, as if to advertise to any potential firefighters that he was lowest priority in an emergency evacuation. I took a pull from my bourbon. I dislike bourbon, but Adam had bought the drinks. This particular brand of bourbon was one of my least favourite brands, and its secret ingredient is probably motor oil and poison, but it would be rude of me to say the name.

It was Kentucky Deluxe.

“How many exes does that make in your rogues gallery?” Adam asked. “Do you have enough to form a volleyball team?”

“Five”.

“Five is a very awkward number” Adam said. “You should try and bring it to six before the end of the year”.

“I'll do my best”.

Adam's vapor wafted from his mouth like you imagine obscene statements waft around politicians.

“You're crying”.

“I don't usually drink whisky before lunch, that's all”. I tossed the bourbon down and then washed my throat with a pint of Montieth's. “We should get lunch”.

“There's one-hundred and twenty-five calories in a pint, and the hops required to ferment the alcohol counts as one of your 'five a day' you know” said our erudite stranger, rising from his seat. “Really, if you just order another jug you'll be filling out your daily nutritional intake splendidly. Now if you'll excuse me gentlemen, I need to go outside to throw up”.

And with a burp and a stumble, he was gone!

“Do you still want to come with me to Auckland tomorrow?”

“No” Adam said, “but I will anyway. Ten o'clock?”

“Sounds good” I smiled at the waitress who had come to collect our empty glassware. She did not smile back. “I should go back to the residence and pack my stuff up”.

Adam nodded and we finished our drinks.

“Are you going to be okay?”

“I'm fine” I lied.

I returned to the Lilac Residence to find that the big whiteboard in the entrance was having the room allocations being erased, as per end-of-semester policy. I watched as the RA rubbed off my name without so much as a second thought. Herman Mott was no longer the occupant of Room 884. I wandered past the whiteboard with a depressing thought nestling in my drunken mind.

Herman Mott was technically homeless at this point.

My room for the year had been a 7x9 metre rectangle, with just enough room for a single bed and desk. I had lived in the room for my first year of university, and only gotten it again when I couldn't find anybody who wanted to live with somebody perpetually unemployable (I was double-majoring in Art History and Film Studies). As I put my key in the door, I sighed at the idea that this might be the last time I ever stepped foot into this residence. Who among us knows with any certainty of all the places we have already visited for the last time?

Everything rested undisturbed from Miley's visit twelve hours earlier. Her scent still lay in the air, and I breathed through my mouth as I boxed up my things. It took me a little under three hours to have everything packed for tomorrow's trip. The majority of this time was spent taking down my array of photos from the pinboard. Every year on my birthday, I start a new collage of photos and at the end of the year make an album. 95% of the photos were Miley. Miley Portus has light brown hair which she often wears untied, and dark blue eyes which often sit behind a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. She only wears T-shirts with patterns and jeans. Psychologists say that smell is the best sense to evoke old memories. On this account, I'm going to disagree with them. Nociception, the sense of pain, takes that title. I packed up the photos. In forty-two days, I would turn twenty years old.

I began to cry.

..

Chapter II

“Just for argument's sake, if I were to suddenly put my foot down as hard as I could on the gas, and I decided to just let go of the steering, what do you think is the likelihood that at least one of us would die instantaneously upon impact?”

“Okay, I get it. No more backseat driving”.

At eleven o'clock, Adam honked his horn in the residence parking lot and I came down with all my worldly possessions- neatly fitted into two suitcases, a backpack, and a duffel bag. Squeezing the backpack into the boot of the car last, I felt a surge of deja vu, as if I was stuffing the body of a close friend into the boot. Being a jerk first and an acquaintance second, as soon as I closed the lid of the boot Adam drove to the other end of the parking lot. When I walked to the car, he'd drive to the other end of the lot.

This went on for twenty minutes.

We drove north in the November sunshine. On my journey down to Wellington, I had traveled by bus and watched streets which I had never seen but which I knew someone else would know as their block of the neighbourhood. I asked if we could take some detours down interesting-looking road. Adam declined. After that, we didn't speak until Adam decided that we should stop for lunch in Matamata. After ordering Big Macs and Cokes, we took our bounty to the benches outside to watch the grass grow.

“Interesting fact about this particular McDonald's” Adam took a huge bite from his burger. “It's the only one in Matamata, and they only agreed to have one in Matamata at all if they could built it on this exact spot. It's all about the foot traffic, they couldn't justify its construction otherwise”.

“That makes me sad that this fact took up actual space in your brain” I said cheerfully. “I miss Georgie Pie; I wish they'd bring it back. That place was awesome”.

“Oh, you can still buy some of the old toys from TradeMe. One of them went for two hundred dollars or something crazy like that”.

Adam smiled. “If I was going to relive the past with two hundred dollars, I'd get drunk and go to the zoo. That would do it”.

“I don't know if that constitutes reliving the past, or just doing something Irish”.

“ 'The past is another country. They do things differently there' ” Adam replied. “You still thinking about Miley?”

“You know when you give yourself a papercut and you don't realize what you've done for a second, and then the pain comes down?” I stretched my arms upward. “The pain is starting to come down now”.

“Okay, let's go. There's still two-ish hours to Auckland, and I'm not a very safe driver in the late afternoon”.

My mother likes to say that although she usually doesn't play favourites, I'm the least favourite of her children. This is more hurtful than it initially appears because I'm an only child. However, when her least favourite child moved out to go to Victoria University, she moved from Grey Lynn to Takapuna, trading one suburb of hipsters for another. It took us three attempts to find Smit Street, and it was a cosy-looking place. Quite frankly, it looked too nice a street for my mother to be living there. I unloaded my luggage from the boot and gazed at the address I had been given the week before. This was my first time visiting the new house, and imagining this trip I thought I might be excited or anxious. I felt bored.

“Do you want to come out and get some tea, meet my mom?” I asked Adam over the hedge of the passenger door window. Adam took one second to contemplate the pros and cons.

“Herman, that is a very considerate offer” Adam nodded, “but I made plans to visit Maggie Lilac while I'm up here, and at the prospect of meeting the woman who birthed you I feel like I would rather give a blowjob to a loaded speargun-”

and then he drove away.

I knocked on the door of the house and felt the momentary fear that all people experience when knocking on a door for the first time. The nightmare plays in your mind that you have the wrong house, and that whoever answers the door will yell at you like you've just killed their cat. My mother did finally open the door with her resting expression which had made children cry. My mother has never been a warm or affectionate person, and I don't think she's ever once greeted someone with 'hello, nice to see you' or 'hi, how's it going?' but that day she really outdid herself.

“Mr. Melville's dead”.

..

Chapter III

My mother took me on the 30-second tour of the house before escorting me to my new digs- 7x8 metres of bare hardwood floors, and a single bed. If my mother had told me that the room was a rather large closet and not a bedroom, I could have believed her. The room was painted the sort of sky blue which can only be properly appreciated in the skies of Singapore. This room did not feel like home to me, and unpacking my belongings did nothing to change that. Sitting on the squeaky bed, I stared out of the sole window at the spectacular view of the brick wall of the house next door and pondered my next move. The sun went down, and I sank into a restless, haunted sleep.

I awoke in the middle of the night with a splitting headache and felt like I was melting in the summer heat. I groped the wall looking for the lightswitch, managing to kick every single item on the floor. The sudden neon light made my headache worse, and it was a Herculean effort to make it to the kitchen. Ransacking the cupboards and throwing drawers open searching for paracetamols, I found some white pills and took two with water (reckless by anyone's standards, but they were either going to kill me or make me better- and those are my two favourite options).

To escape the discomfort, I slipped out of the house after taking my time remembering where the door was. Losing Miley made me morose. This house was making me furious. I felt like an unwelcome guest at a lunatic asylum. To cope with the fury coursing through my veins I stood on the front lawn and shouted at the moon until I wore out my lungs (you're doing a bad job, Moon!) Did that make me feel any better?

Guess.

At the ripe age of nineteen, I stole my mother's car.

Did I have a driver's license? No.

Was I a very good driver? No.

Did I have a destination? Absolutely.

It was quiet on the roads but deafeningly loud in my mind. I once read a news story about the world's nicest man who became so frustrated with his lot in life that he armoured a bulldozer with 30 centimetres of concrete and went on a rampage through his town. Do I mention this because I believe more people need to know about the dangers of the Killdozer? Partially, but the man also said something in his farewell note that I have always known but never put into words. “I was always willing to be reasonable until I had to be unreasonable”, he wrote. “Sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things”.

I had trouble finding a parking space, and this amplified the fact that I have trouble parking cars in general. Eventually I parked a few blocks down from the house I wanted and walked in the night air. It was an hour where the workers go to bed and the hipsters go to clubs. Though the house had no lights on, I knocked anyway. The door was one familiar thing to me. Eventually, a familiar face answered.

“This can't be good”.

“I didn't know Mr. Melville died, and I'm not sure now what I can do about that” I did not say.

“It's been a rough few days” I did not add.

Ashlee opened the door properly. “I think you'd better come in”.

As Ashlee flicked on the lights in the house, I noticed that some of Mr. Melville's things were untouched. Books in a never-used fireplace, ashtrays on top of the piano, hand-crafted folk masks on the wall. A box wall shielded the left side of the house. Ashlee made me a cup of tea and a plate of Tim-Tams and we sat in the backyard patio.

I looked towards Ashlee. “When?”

“About six months ago” Ashlee said, lighting a cigarette. “Inoperable brain tumour. It was a very nice service, few friends, scattered the ashes over the Pacific. He didn't want anyone to know”.

“Yeah” I said. “That does sound like him. My mother just told me today”.

“I figured you probably didn't know, but after he passed there's not much anyone can do” Ashlee smoked. “Didn't you get a letter from him?”

“Melville was a talented writer and a wise man, but even he can't post things from beyond the grave”. Ashlee gave me a light slap on the forearm for my silliness.

“He wrote letters to everyone he knew, to be mailed posthumously” Ashlee told me. “I'm sure he did write you a letter. Another cup of tea? Coffee? Or something stronger?”

“I'm good” I answered her. “I never told him that he was my favourite teacher”.

“Don't worry. He knows”.

“You mean he knew”.

“He knows”. A wobble of young drunks paraded passed the back fence and Ashlee and I waited for them to pass, quietly amused at their rubber, orange, conical headgear. “I'm going to miss this place. So many good memories of jam sessions, and the chiquita”.

I sipped tea. “You're not going to stay here?”

“This is Melville's house” Ashlee said. “It's not my house. Besides, I'm moving in with my brother in a couple of days. You can't live in the past”.

“You can always try” I murmured.

“How's uni treating you these days?”

“Quite well. If you come to my birthday, you can meet some of my uni friends. Well, 'friend' might be too strong a word but we definitely all don't go to class together”.

“And how's your girlfriend?”

“Let's not go there”.

Ashlee rummaged through some of Mr. Melville's old folders and found his List of Last Letters. My name was there, and beside it was the wrong address to which the letter had presumably been mailed. I thanked Ashlee and though she offered me the couch, I returned to my mother's car. Ashlee had been a year younger than me at school, and when Mr. Melville heard that her mother was moving their family to Huntly, he spared Ashlee such a punishment by offering his own home to her.

The world is a lesser place without him in it.

I crashed the car.

Every muscle in my body tensed. I could not breathe. The driver of the car in front of me got out and walked towards me and I quickly said a prayer. Dear Lord in heaven, please be merci-

“Are you okay?” the man asked, and my shock began to convert into confusion. I can't imagine many people's first instinct after getting hit by someone else is to ask if they are okay. The man was in his late twenties and was wearing a blue suit and a smile.

“Ah...”

“It's okay” the man put his hand on my shoulder, and I believed him. Able to breathe again, I tried to apologize with my eyes while I came up with something to say.

“I'm Joseph”.

“Herman” I finally managed. “I am really, really sorry about hitting you!”

Joseph chuckled. “Come out and check the damage”.

There were pins and needles in my joints as I undid my seat-belt and walked out of the car. It was dark so I used my cellphone screen as a flashlight. Joseph's car had a mug-sized dent in it, and my mother's car had a dinner plate-dent in the front bumper.

“Please don't take me to claims court, I have no money” I pleaded. “I can prove it! Let me show you my university ID-”

“It's really okay” Joseph said, as if this happened to him every day. “No one was hurt, and that's the main thing. Do you want to swap numbers and insurance details?”

“I stole my mom's car to find out when my History teacher died” I blurted out. “Also, my girlfriend cheated on me and then left me. I'm really sorry about your car!”

“You...said that already” Joseph winked at me as he took photos of the car damage on his phone. “I guess you don't have insurance”.

I fought the need to apologize a fourth time. “I'm not sure I even have a home anymore”.

“There's no one around. I'll tell them it was a hit and run” Joseph said. “Don't sweat it”.

“Has anyone ever told you that you're the coolest person to ever walk this earth?”

“All the time, but it never gets old” Joseph shook my hand. “Take care of yourself Herman”.

We were about to let go of each others' hands and never see each other again, and then all the evil in the world came out of Joseph's car. I repeated what Ashlee had said to me an hour ago.

“That can't be good”.