Eric

I haven't taken part in the #whimword prompt for a while, so thought I'd jump in again with this one. It takes place in the same world as Seed and Producers, but not at the same time. As always, while you're here, take a look at my Unbound page and pledge to pre-order my debut novel. 

“What is it this time?” Doris asked, without looking up. She didn’t much care what the answer was. She kept her eyes firmly on her desk, and waited.

“Labyrinthitis,” Bill said. “Inflammation of the inner ear. He claims he can’t stand up without feeling dizzy.” Doris sighed, and got up.

“All right,” she said, wearily. “Let me have a look at him.”

Eric was waiting for her in his quarters, eyes closed. He was supine on the top bunk, a pile of his laundry on the lower one. This was the third ailment he’d claimed to be suffering from in as many weeks, but he knew she’d come. He knew they were stuck with each other. It was just as he’d planned it.

Doris weaved her way through the maze of interlinking corridors towards the staff quarters. Eric was a world-class shirker, but she couldn’t get rid of him. Company rules prohibited letting anyone go who was actively unwell, regardless of the symptoms. They weren’t concerned about unfair dismissal: no one would come after them for that. They simply couldn’t be seen to be the source of any kind of outbreak. They were already in a precarious position, and a burnout would ruin them.

“If you can’t get up without feeling dizzy,” Doris said, “how did you get up there?”

“Slept here. Woke up feeling like this,” Eric said. He kept his eyes shut, hands folded neatly on his stomach. Doris clenched and unclenched her fists.

“Why do you do this?” she asked.

“Do what?” Eric opened his eyes at last and swivelled his head ever so slightly in her direction.

“This!” She gestured around the room, which, bar the unfolded laundry, was neat as a pin. “Pretend to be sick, lock yourself up in here! What do you get out of it?” Eric closed his eyes again. He’d barely been in the lab since he’d started a month earlier, and had instead focused solely on making Doris’s life miserable, as far as she could tell.

“I’m not pretending,” he said.

“No, of course not. This isn’t a ploy to get paid for doing nothing because you know I can’t stop you. That would be ridiculous,” Doris growled, jaw tightening.

“If you don’t think I’m sick,” Eric said, “fire me. Nobody would blame you.”

“Yes, they would! Knowing my luck, there’d be an outbreak the minute you set foot outside, and if they found out I’d let you go, you know who they’d blame, whether it was you that started it or not!” Doris shouted. Eric sat up slightly, and looked her in the eye for the first time.

“So what?” he said. Doris stared at him.

“So what? So what? This company is the last one left with the resources to fund this compound. We’re the only ones studying this damn disease. If they burn us out, there’s no cure, no treatment. That’s it. We’re done. We’re all done.”

“Well, then,” Eric said, “looks like you’re stuck with me.”

Thanksgiving

This one was rejected by Flash Fiction Online. Once again, I still like it, so here it is:


“What are we going to do?” I asked. Annie fixed me with that familiar look of indignation mixed with frustration, reserved just for me. It made me feel sort of special. Nobody could piss her off like I could.

“That,” she said, “is possibly the stupidest question you’ve ever asked. And you’ve asked some doozies, believe me.”

“It’s not a stupid question,” I muttered. I was sulking. I knew I was sulking and she knew I was sulking. Annie sighed and rolled her eyes.

“For Christ’s sake, David, put your big boy pants on and help me, would you? We don’t have time for this.” She jumped down from the front seat of the jeep and slammed the door shut. “Well? What are you waiting for? Christmas?” It was something Mom used to say and it threw me for a second. I’d never noticed it before, but Annie was becoming more and more like her.

Reluctantly, I got out of the driver’s seat and stood beside her, staring at the body. It was still warm: I could feel the heat radiating out of it through my clothes. It wasn’t a big animal – an adolescent, maybe. I pictured it fully-grown – majestic, lord of all it surveyed – and felt a rush of sickness. It looked so small after what I’d done to it, just lying there, the imprint of a jeep tyre on its lower flank. Felled by my crappy driving.

“Help you do what, exactly?” I asked. The engine was still sputtering away behind us, sending plumes of greyish exhaust into the late fall air. Annie turned away from me.

“We,” she said, getting down on her knees behind the animal, “are going to throw this stupid deer into that ditch, and then we’re going to carry on like nothing happened.”

“Moose,” I said, quietly.

“What?” she asked, pushing her shoulder against it.

“It’s a moose,” I repeated. “Not a deer.”

“Thanks for the biology lesson. Now would you get down here? We need to… roll… this thing… over… so we can… drag it… out… of the road.” Her voice came out stilted and breathless with the exertion.

“Fine,” I said. “But shouldn’t we… call somebody?” I pressed my full weight into the animal’s flesh, feeling its moisture seeping through my jacket.

“Like… who?” Annie asked. The moose flopped into the mud with a sad squelch, and she hopped to her feet, panting.

“I don’t know. Animal control?” I wiped my hands on my pants and immediately regretted it, watching two big, brownish smears appear. Annie closed her eyes.

“It’s dead, David. It’s not rabid,” she said. Then she started to laugh. Big, full-throated laughs rolled through her body, and she bent over, covering her face with her hands. I stared at her.

“What’s so goddamn funny?” I asked. She shook her head, trying to catch her breath.

“N-nothing,” she stuttered. “I just… I suddenly had a-a mental image of a big, c-crazy Bullwinkle running around in the woods.” She made a goofy face and a weird mooing sound, imitating a deranged cartoon moose. I tried not to smile. I didn’t want to laugh. But I could feel myself losing control, the muscles in my face stretching, and then I couldn’t stop it. It felt good – like a release.

“Come on,” she said, taking a deep breath. “You take his front legs, I’ll take his back legs.” I nodded, and grabbed the slippery limbs as tightly as I could.

“I-I’m sorry,” I said. Annie looked up at me from her end of the moose.

“What for?” she asked. She looked startled.

“You know. For doing stuff like this. For being a pain in your ass. For… being me.” I thought about the time I fell out of a second floor window when I tried pot for the first time, and the time I smashed Grandma’s urn when I was practising my golf swing in the living room, and the time I got fired from Walgreens for stealing cough syrup, and the time I got a DWI. I thought about all the times Annie had saved my ass, and I thought about all the resentment in her voice, every time she spoke to me.

“Oh come on, David, quit feeling sorry for yourself,” she said.

“I’m not. I mean it. I know I’m a screw-up. I know… I know you hate me.” Abruptly, Annie dropped the moose’s legs and stood up straight.

“What the hell are you talking about? I don’t hate you! You’re my baby brother!” she exclaimed.

“But you… I mean, you’re always so… ” I faltered.

“Jesus, David! You think I hate you? This is just what we do! You screw up, I bail you out, then I get to bust on you for it. It’s our thing!” Shaking her head, she stooped and picked up the lifeless limbs again. “Now help me toss this moose carcass in the ditch, and then you can explain to Mom why we’re so late for Thanksgiving dinner.” I smiled.

“Well… thanks, I guess,” I said, and she smiled back.

In the end, we only got as far as sliding the body out of the car’s path. I remembered reading somewhere that an adult male moose weighed an average of eight hundred pounds, and suddenly counted my blessings I’d only hit a baby. When we let go, it sank down among the leaves, its nose tucked into its chest, almost like it was sleeping. I shook my head and let a silent prayer go. Poor little guy. He never saw it coming.

“You sure there’s nothing wrong with the car?” I asked, starting the engine.

“It’s a jeep, David. It’s fine,” Annie said, but her voice was softer, more reassuring than annoyed. She glanced in the rear view mirror as we set off. “I’ll be damned…” she breathed.

“What?” I followed her line of sight. There it was, standing right in the middle of the road, just like nothing had happened – the moose.

The Fight

This was rejected by The Forge, but I still like it, so I thought I'd put it on here just for the sake of it. Enjoy!

So we had this fight when we were kids, right, I remember it like it was yesterday, it wasn’t one of our usual fights, just playfights, just nothing, no, it was a proper fucking brawl, proper knock-down, drag-out, but not really a fight when you think about it because there was no way I could stop you, I was never any match, you were always going to get the best of me. I was twelve and you were sixteen, it was just after your birthday, and you were always much bigger than me anyway, and you had me on the ground, and you were holding my arms down with one hand and you were pulling out big hanks of my hair with the other, and fuck you for that, by the way, I looked like a fucking scarecrow for weeks, and I still have a patch that never grew back.

I don’t know what set you off to this day, you just jumped on me, started punching me, no reason at all that I could see, but that didn’t matter, or maybe it did, I don’t know, maybe there was a reason, but anyway, you just kept screaming and crying, you stupid kid, you stupid kid, fight back, you stupid fucking kid, like you were possessed, like you were fucking crazy or something. I kept trying to ask you what the fuck was going on, what the fuck you were doing, stop, stop, stop, please fucking stop, but you couldn’t hear me or you didn’t want to, just kept hitting and hitting and yanking and yanking on my hair, and you didn’t stop until one of the other lads pulled you off, until I was all bloody and half-bald, and then you were just shaking and silent and you never said sorry, but I think you were.

That was the last day I saw you, they took you away after that, care or something, uncontrollable temper or something, or maybe they stuck you in the young offenders, I never knew, they wouldn’t tell me where they took you, and no one ever talked about it after that, not Ma, not anyone, and as much as I hated you for what you did, I hated them more, they were the ones who really fucked everything up, they didn’t understand, it wasn’t supposed to be like that, we were supposed to stick together. Before that day, it was good, we had a laugh, we chased the lasses from the estate, and when it was nice, we went down the river and chucked stones, we never could get the hang of skipping them, and we nicked fags from Ma and magazines from the offie, never the really nasty stuff, just the Playboys, and you looked out for me, you protected me, took care of me, you were my brother and I needed you.

I know it wasn’t the first time, there were other lads, sometimes small like me, sometimes much bigger than you and you’d come off the worst of it, and probably more that I didn’t know about, but I always knew it was just you standing up for yourself, just you being you, and you had mates, or at least respect anyway, and a gang to hang around with, and I knew you’d be ok, I knew we’d both get on all right in the end. You were supposed to go ahead of me, show me how to do it, tell me what it was like in the big wide world, tell me about girls and sex and stuff, teach me how to be a man, but after they took you, there was no one, no one to look after me, no one at all, and fuck you for that, too, because how the fuck was I going to stand up for myself without you teaching me how.

I know what you’re thinking, Ma was still there, I still had her and she had me, but she had her own stuff to deal with, she had too much to do, she didn’t have time to worry about me, not really, just enough to make sure I didn’t do anything properly stupid, like kick someone’s head in, like something you might have done, and she couldn’t teach me anything anyway, what the fuck did she even know. It’s so stupid, I started missing Dad then, like, for the first time ever, and you know what’s really stupid about that, I never even met him, but you did, and you always told me he was a top bloke, just like this really great guy, but he was too cool for us, too cool to hang around and he’d gone off to fly fighter jets or be a kung fu master or something like that, and I even asked Ma about it, but she just laughed and said don’t be so daft, your dad, flying fighter jets, what are you like, and fuck you for that, too, fuck you for lying and fuck you for never owning up.

You didn’t come back after she died, I don’t even know if they told you, or if you cared if they did, but you didn’t come to the funeral and that’s when I decided to try and find you, tell you what a fucking twat you were, I was bigger by then, I could have given you a taste of your own medicine, could have knocked some fucking sense into you, but I never did, I couldn’t, it was too late. They told me what happened, dressing gown cord around the neck, tied it to a railing and jumped over, just like that, no dressing it up, no sugar coating, and I should have realised, I should have seen it, I should have asked you, probably every day was a fight for you, probably you never really were happy, even when it was good, when you had me, and I am sorry for that at least.

Full review of Abernathy

Rose Drew, mentioned in this post on Medium, has now written a full review of the proof copy of Abernathy. I should stress, these views are totally her own, and I’m truly humbled by her kind words!

As always, go to http://unbound.co.uk/books/abernathy to pledge and pre-order the book.

“In Abernathy, Claire Patel-Campbell’s debut novel, you’re struck, first, by the evocative words, dropping you into small-town America: which could be small-town England; to an extent, small-town anywhere. You feel the frost in your bones, your breath freezes, and you shiver with dread. Patel-Campbell has a sure hand with these places, and people, and you walk the same streets and drink the same bad coffee; feel as claustrophobic or as powerful (depending) as one can get in a tiny town with secrets.

“This is Hitchcockian, a gradual building of violence and facts and innuendo, described in snatches of backstories and side-histories, as the whole town and the story of the lost frozen woman gathers speed and rushes down the mountain (only figuratively: this place is a flat as every mid-western town, ever), filling a valley village with shock, crashing danger and rubble. You’ll peep through curtains, suspicious of everyone else, as the story swerves and changes, rebuilds and resolves, only to plunge on.

“I was drawn in from the first words: I have lived in or had relatives who lived in teensy towns like this, essentially founded and then run by the same family for 200 years. In its own way, even quietly wealthy Greenwich, Connecticut, with its murders and bad-seed clans, was like this in the 1970s. But please set aside some time when you pick this up book: you will struggle to tear yourself away. I found I simply could not put Abernathy down until the last page was turned over. And now of course, Gallagher, and Murphy, and Sally and Sarah, are sitting patiently by my elbow, urging me to revisit their stories in my thoughts. I will not be able to resist.”

Rose Drew, October 2016

Find out more about Rose and her work here: http://www.stairwellbooks.co.uk/

Abernathy character interview, part III

Here's the third instalment, this time with Jimmy Murphy, the last person to see Sarah McIntyre alive. As always, visit my Unbound page, watch the video, read the excerpt and pledge to pre-order.

Name: James (Jimmy) Murphy

Age: 29

Occupation: Labourer, construction worker

Place of birth: The back of my mom’s Camry, or so my dad said

How did you and Sally meet?

Church, back when I used to go. I liked her right away. I liked how she didn’t know how pretty she was when she smiled. She was so smart and funny – way too good for me. I knew that, even if she didn’t. I kept waiting for her to find somebody better, waiting for her to figure it out. I wanted her to figure it out. She deserved…more than me.

How long have you been married?

Almost five years. I asked her when we’d been dating for, like, two months. I knew she’d say yes. I knew how much she wanted to love and be loved. All I ever wanted was to make her happy. Guess that didn’t work out so great.

Why not?

It’s like I said: she deserves more. I’m weak. I know I am – always was. She should have somebody who can take care of her. Not somebody like me. I tried to be better for her, but…I guess I just didn’t have it in me.  

If you could live anywhere else in the world, where would it be?

Someplace warm and quiet, where I could be out of everybody’s way and I wouldn’t have to live up to anybody’s expectations. Someplace where there was nobody to disappoint. Someplace where I could just…be.

What’s the one thing that makes you proudest?

Making Sally happy, at least for a little while. I know she’s not happy now – hasn’t been for years, no matter how hard she tries to pretend otherwise. But there was a time when she didn’t have to pretend, and I’m glad of that.

When were you happiest?

Honestly? I don’t know that I’ve ever really been happy. I don’t think I ever did enough to earn it.

What’s your biggest regret?

That I let Sally down so badly. I wish I could tell her how sorry I am, how much I always loved her, but it’s way too late for that now. It’s too late to make any of it better. I just hope maybe she knows somehow.

What’s your greatest fear?

That I hurt her too much for her to ever get over it.  Sally, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.