The Stalker

The Stalker

Fredwin Bones

There is no graceful crying, when we go our lips turn up like sad puppets and the waterworks come like rains.

“I kind of fucking hate you right now” She said.

“Good” I croaked “You should hate me… I hope you find someone else.”

“So this is it?”

“…Yeah…This is it…”

A 20 second coup de gras’ delivered by satellites. Two people who weren’t even in the same room deciding they would never share a bed again.

How could it be that easy?

A few clicks later we were no longer “official” on Facebook. “Good Fucking Riddance” read her status, already gathering “likes” when I saw it. So that was the last time I went on facebook. I didn’t want to see my friends picking up their pitchforks and torches.

We used to whisper.

2

I’d always wanted to stalk someone, just to see what it felt like.

You can buy spy gear online, but I’m not sure if the people who invented the stuff put much thought into practicality. What do you do if someone comes up to you asking why you’re holding a tiny satellite? Say you were trying to get Foxtel in your hatchback?

We spend our lives knowing that there is no one out there in the dark: that’s just something that happened in horror movies. But for whomever I followed, that reality would not be relegated to slasher flicks. Even if the point was for them to never know, was there something still morally wrong about being a watcher?

And what if they did know? What if I was caught out, scurrying over their backyard fence at midnight? Their minds would be forever imprinted with the image of my face, a fake moustache peeling from my lip as I exited into the night.

Was this how serial killers got started out? One day it’s “I wonder what it would be like to follow someone” the next it’s “I wonder what it would be like to eat someone?”

I didn’t want to eat anyone.

I needed a drink.

It couldn’t be anyone I know could it? For one thing they would easily recognize and spot me, but even if they didn’t it would be too weird, too personal, like it would somehow contaminate the purity of the experiment if I already knew anything about the person.

A name popped into my head, so did a beautiful face that made me that nice kind of nervous.

No goddamn it

We’re all the stars of our own movies, we all seem to think we’re the protagonists and our stories are enough to fill our own world.

I crawled into bed, and that beautiful face began to assemble itself in my mind. I always had trouble remembering the nose, I’d imagine it too big and it would completely look like the wrong person. But then when I stopped concentrating she would appear, standing there behind a checkout or putting yoghurt on the yoghurt shelf.

Sometimes she’d be wearing this smile, this sort of smile like she knew something you didn’t know.

She had the same name as that girl from those stupid vampire books. I finished my whisky and went to bed.

3

Do you know what you see when you walk around a neighbourhood at night, looking into peoples windows? Flat-screens.

I bought a bottle of soda water as a consolation prize. I had work tomorrow, so tonight was vodka-soda night, I was watching my figure.

All our badness could be done online now. There were websites for sex, profiles upon profiles of horny people, of all shapes and sizes. Married people could even look for other married people for affairs, like two wrongs make it right, like it’s okay to drive the car into the lake as long as they have a passenger.

If you didn’t want to go to the trouble of fucking someone else you could fuck yourself from the comfort of your sticky office chair. With high speed connections came access to the giant dopamine switch, turning us all into rats in psychological experiments.

The only thing that had stopped it for a while was thinking of that girl, made me want to be a better man. Her eyes shone a light onto the ugly wretch that was me, but ignited the fire inside that I could carry with me into the light. Apparently vodka made me shit bad metaphors. Go to bed Fred, you’re drunk.

4

She had a boyfriend now. The girl in the apparel section told me while she was folding t-shirts. Got herself a man. I must be heartbroken, she said. The guilty crush that I had sworn to keep to myself but had been telling everyone about apparently. I was loose lipped when I drank.

“Why are you still smiling?” She said later on.

I guess I wasn’t that heartbroken after all. I felt like maybe I had turned a new page, I was hanging out with people, seeing live music. Even mended some bridges with the ex, I think she wanted to kill herself, but she seemed that way when we were together too.

I kept smiling, calm before the storm. Then one day, you’re standing at the front counter and the girl shows up to pick up her roster with the new guy, tall, motorcycle leathers. And you can’t look at them; you catch enough of it in your periphery. And maybe it sucks or maybe it’s okay but whatever you feel you can’t show it, and you can’t feel it because you can’t show it and it goes somewhere else.

There’s no point carrying the torch anymore because it’s not lit.

The lights are out, disco is dead.

And you tell yourself all the other things you have to love and in the meantime there’s coffee and music and pancakes and booze and gigabytes upon gigabytes of degradation. You’re just filling the time before you bounce back at it all, right? You’ll start exercising again, you’ll write new songs, you’ll practice your vocals. Right after you go out and grab a coffee, finish digesting, watch this clip of a housewife fucking her husbands co-workers.

Everything is a trigger for you to stay in your ugly little comfort zone, it’s 3am and you’re watching a woman cook a lasagne in a frying pan. Wait wasn’t tomorrow the day I was going to get back to not being a fat loser? Tomorrow started 3 hours ago, I’m gonna eat a bowl of instant noodles.

And then the other night you’re driving home from a friend’s house and you see someone standing out there in the dark. Looking like she’s wearing one of those white dresses the women wear in those English dramas.

Maybe you see it because you want to see it. Because it’s a lot more interesting if there is something anachronistic atop that black gravel hill. The world has to play these tricks on us to get us out of a jam, make us fall in love to give us a reason to leave relationships. Siren calls to get us off a sinking ship.

I see her and I remember a story I was writing, maybe she wants it to be about her.

5

“Why the fuck is Joy Division following me everywhere I go? I hadn’t heard hardly any since High School but now it’s everywhere.”

“It’s probably because you’ve started going to gigs where the 20-somethings go” Says Josh, pulling on his tangled beard.

I’m about to say he’s probably right when an asian girl walks in with her boyfriend, her T-shirt is the cover of “Unknown Pleasures”. Sure it’s just a coincidence just like Josh says, but I laugh harder than I should, she takes offence, remains stone-faced and heads towards the band room.

“Sitting near the bathrooms smells like piss” Muses Josh.

“A lot of this place smells like piss, have you ever heard of synchronicity?”

I explain the concept incorrectly and badly. Trying to tie a knot between the Joy Division thing and Carl Jung’s concept of an invisible framework behind all the seeming chaos of the world. Didn’t hold. Have to look that shit up on wikipedia again later.

“Shall we grind?” Says Josh, already tiring of my shit and wanting to get back to the next power-punk-death-violence act.

“I’ll catch up,” I said to the back of his t-shirt.

Outside the window I saw the woman again. That same white dress, her back to me, she turns and shows me her face in profile, raises a cigarette in wooden holder to her lips.

I don’t smoke; I go out to smoke with her.

None of the bars sidewalk lurkers seem to notice her, but this is the kind of town where everyone’s trying to look like somewhere else anyway.

I don’t think you’re gonna find Mr Darcy here tonight. Is the line.

I walk towards the street light that surrounds her, my nerve wants to fail me but I have the line, and so I have to say it now. Joke commitment.

She looks towards the highway and smokes her cigarette, disinterested. It’s like watching a skipping rope but it’s too quick to find your rhythm, fuck it.

“I don’t think you’re gonna-“

“Shut the fuck up.”

She has a nice voice. Low, warm, charming, people underrate charm in their women.

“Uh… Sure, as you wish.”

“Don’t leave.”

I stop mid-exit, pulling a grimace of confusion, what a rude woman, is what I should be thinking so I play it. She doesn’t react and I like that too.

“O-kay then”

I sidle up beside her, leaning against the wall, blast beats pulsate from the building behind us.

“You’re right about Joy Division,” She says, pouring a veil of smoke into the streetlight scene in front of us. “They are following you”

The End

“Have you ever thought about killing some one?” She said.

I turned around in my office chair; she was lying on the head of my bed, her legs up against the wall.

“I like lying down like that,” I said “after a while it feels like you could just fall up and walk on the ceiling. It’d suck if someone turned on the fan and you walked into it.”

“Fredwin.” She said with stopping power.

“You know what” I said, “I get it. You’re imaginary. You’re some sort of thing I created to help me work through personal stuff and eventually it turns out we’re the same person and it’ll be all like “oooh it all makes sense now” but I already know you’re not real. Have you already killed anybody? I mean, have we killed anybody yet?”

She dropped her legs down from the wall and rolled onto her stomach to face me, head cradled in her two palms, Hepburn stance.

“Easy there, how do we know that you’re not the imaginary one? Maybe you’re just some mild mannered try-hard musician who I subconsciously summoned to deal with my capricious nature.”

“Well I have a job, friends, failures, a bunch of boring shit that makes up the everyday. And I know I’m real, although maybe that’s what a subconscious entity would think too. Maybe I am imaginary.”

“See? I’m not fucking imaginary, I’m on facebook and everything” she said.

“Damn. I’m not on facebook. Well your subconscious could have summoned someone else a bit more pretty than me.” I said.

“You really think I’m pretty enough to just be a figment of your porn-jaded imagination?” She asked.

“I was sure you were”

“That’s sweet” She said “Stop talking yourself down or one of these days I’ll fuck some sense into you”

I blushed. Chuckled.

“But if we’re imaginary, that’d be too weird.”

I turned back to the open word document.

“Skull-fuck…” I muttered to myself, squinting at the screen.

“So what about this girl with the name from the vampire books?”

BELLA

“Come on, she’s right over there on register six, just let me go have a chat.”

“I like this girl, you’re not still talking about murdering people are you?”

“No you fucking idiot, I figured if we started out with murder I could bargain you down to stalking.”

“You want to stalk her?”

“Why not? You were going to write that story of yours. I’ll help out with the research.”

“Well for one thing you dress like fucking Buckingham palace, not exactly low profile.”

“I own black stuff”

“You’re fucking crazy.”

“I’m gonna go talk to her.”

“You better not”

She already was, I watched from afar, straightening up a display of photocopy paper like I was a perfectionist. Couldn’t see shit for all the customers. Damn. I retired to the storeroom to be anxious.

Elaine caught up to me on my coffee break. Her name’s Elaine by the way.

“I know that girl,” She said, taking a seat across from me. “She’s crazy about the Jesus, you know. I know her through a guy who runs one of those youth groups.”

“I’m not hearing this, this is wrong, tell me more.”

“Oh yeah, they go away on camps and shit and make with the short term goals and the long term goals and the power of Christ compels you, yaddah yaddah. Anyway I know the name of the boyfriend.”

“How did you get that out of a 12 second transaction?”

“I didn’t, I went on your facebook last night when you went to sleep. Also I reactivated your facebook account”

“You cunt of a slut”

“You should see the boyfriend, now there’s a cunt of a slut if I’ve ever known one. I know where he lives you know.”

“What? No. This is already half past weird already; I don’t even want to know his

THOMAS LEHANE

“You sleepwalk at night.” Said Elaine, lacing up her combat boots.

“I do?”

“Last night you got up, kept saying the same thing over and over again, looking through your drawers, no one’s ever caught you sleepwalking before?”

“No, never. Although this one time I woke up and my sneakers were lying on the pillow next to me. I thought ghosts at first but then I figured it was just me.”

“Shoe fucker” She said, lifting herself off the bed and walking to the record player. “You have a repressed desire to bang your sneakers”

“Is sleepwalking that? I thought it was just dreams that were repressed things we needed to work through, sleepwalking is just stress or something. What was I saying?”

“Just her name, over and over again.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“I am, but that makes for a better story.”

“What was I saying?”

“I don’t remember”

“Fuck you, you don’t remember. You hardly sleep.”

“We have to leave this one blank for a while, it’s better if you find out later”

“Thanks Elaine, I love your little games. Speaking of which, dressing like an action hero doesn’t make us the good guys, lose the bandana.”

She pulled the red swatch of T-shirt out of her brunette hair. She has brunette hair, by the way.

“Fine” She said, “But I’m gonna be playing “New Dawn Fades” over and over again while we drive there. One of us has to be cinematic.”

BETH LEHANE

“Looks like mumma’s making muffins” Said Elaine, passing me the binoculars, proud of herself, like this was real progress.

“That’s great” I said, putting the binoculars in my lap. “Can we go home so I can eat ice cream until the happy arrives?”

“I’m going to get one of her muffins.”

“Don’t even think about it. What flavour are they?” I said, picking up the binoculars.

I looked into the Lehane kitchen, mother Lehane was sitting in the background watching women’s talk shows. A box stood on the counter. Poppy-seed. Fuck poppy-seed.

“It’s not even worth it,” I said, putting down the binoculars. “I’d only commit crime for double chocolate.”

“The flavour is superfluous you idiot. It’s a trophy, a muffin shaped trophy, the crossing of the threshold.”

“We got really close to the threshold, so close we could smell the muffins, but now I think we should go back inside, there’s ice cream inside.”

“It’ll be dark soon, we’ll stake them out until they go to sleep, and then I will walk across that threshold and take myself a muffin.”

“I will not have a stake out unless we actually eat steak during the stake-out.”

“Deal”

SARA GROGAN

“Wake up, dude.”

Elaine was asleep against the passenger door, her stealth black painted fingernails resting against the window. Her black skirt was riding up and I pulled it down to protect her womanhood, her underpants were green cotton if you must know.

“Elaine, the guy’s here. You’ve been out for a while, must’ve been all the steak you ate.”

“…You ate all my steak…” She said, groaning to life.

“Well I paid for the steak, so technically I ate my steak but anyway shut up. Look.”

I motioned to the motorcycle dismounting tall guy and his pillian passenger, a blonde girl, not the girl.

“Ooh, who’s the bang-skank?” She asked, already running at 90 percent Elaine.

“Bang-skank? How do you know she’s a bang- Oh.”

They were kissing.

“What a bastard” Said Elaine. “Someone should have stolen some of that guys muffins, teach him a lesson. What are we gonna do?”

“I don’t know, nothing, this is not our business, we can’t do anything.”

“Oh bullshit, you catch the new guy cheating on your dream girl, I can tell you’re already fantasising about the hero moment in your head. How does it go down?”

“Well… It’s in the parking lot at work and I catch him arguing with Bella about where he was last night and he loses his temper and just as he’s right about to go Chris Brown on her I step in and take the hit. And then there’s a fight and maybe I win or maybe I lose but either way it’s all romantic and shit.”

“Aren’t you just the white knight? You don’t even bang her in that fantasy.”

“It’s romantic, we bang after the credits roll.”

“Well none of that shit is going to happen, she’ll probably never find out, and if she does there’ll probably be some mild over the phone confrontation, or maybe they would work it out and come out stronger as a couple”

“That is disgusting.” I said, wrapping my fingers around the steering wheel. “Reconciliation…Eugh.”

“You should just kick his ass. Go over there and kick his ass, I’ll help but she doesn’t need to know that I did.”

“That’s not very heroic, that just sounds like assault.”

“We can assault, I can assault, we could be assaulters.”

“No, don’t do that” I said, to the already empty seat next to me, she left her door open. What a crazy woman, was what I was supposed to feel in this situation, but I didn’t play it.

Elaine

I left imaginary boy sitting in his car to stew, but I guess he probably wasn’t imaginary, he could drive, imaginary friends can’t drive.

Fredwin might as well have been imaginary though, for all the foot he wouldn’t put to face he might as well have been a ghost. I felt the weight of the cobalt black iron in my hands, getting closer to them now.

Prepare yourself asshole, I am the face of every woman you scorn, I am the broken heart incarnate, I am not sure I want to do this anymore.

I stop 15 metres short; they’re still there, canoodling. They haven’t seen me, which is lucky, if they saw me I would have to go through with it, assault commitment. But now there’s the voice of Fredwin in the back of my head, reining me back in. Because this guy and the other girl aren’t even facebook official. No point breaking the wrong skulls, no catharsis in that. No catharsis in anything anymore, I guess that’s the problem.

I feel Fredwin coming towards me, it’s romantic if you put it in slow motion.  From behind me, his hands come around my waist, slowly and firmly encircling me, one hand momentarily gracing my breast. I feel his warm breath, grunting with passion as his collarbone meets my back, the beat of his heart on my skin. And then we float for a moment, together through that dark night, descending to the nature strip below like tangled up angels.

And then Fredwin’s knee is in my back and he’s shouting. “None of your fucking business! Get back in your fucking house! No! Don’t you take another fucking step! Call the goddamn police then!”

He pulls me up by my shoulders; the truncheon is left lying there in the street. He throws me into the passenger seat and he tries to do a U turn and drive off quickly but the car doesn’t have power steering. He agonises through a 5-point turn and we accelerate towards the main road. He doesn’t talk for a while, which is weird because Fredwin doesn’t do the silent treatment thing, he thinks it’s cruel. He’s only quiet when he’s trying not to cry.

We make it all the way to the Hungry Jack’s near his house before he says anything. He stops the Starlet in the parking lot.

“That…was fucking awesome.”

And then he cries.

And then we get chocolate sundaes.

The End