nutella
On the first day after the cold winter, as I felt the sun make me lithe in my skin, it started. Some graffiti on the wall by my flat. “My name” it said. It just said “My name” and when, a couple of days later she wrote her name underneath it, I viewed it with a mixture of boredom and resignation. “Oh, her” I thought, more interested in my hangover, and how the sun flecked through my fringe. A sigh between the steps on the way out in the mornings. Restless, the gifts arrived. The letters under the front door at midnight, the presents left with the concierge with the awkward smile. Whisky, gin, vodka, cigars, a video cassette, a book, some paper flecked dark red, and some photographs she’d hopefully developed herself. I drank what I could, and I burnt the unopened letters with the cigars.

Then my mother, so far away that the sky above us had different star flecked nights, started getting phone calls. She was bemused – from a telephone exchange on the hot, dusty city, the voice pulsed its way to her receiver, where she would listen as she watched Corrie as the rain fell angry on the window.

“He’s not worth it, dear” she said she said. And I didn’t blame her. For a start she was right.

The woman sat right in front of my desk and every time I tried to joke about the Present Perfect she would open her legs. As the other students talked about the people they’d scammed or the exams they’d failed, she’d look at me and just for a second, just for a second, I would think about losing myself in her soft brown eyes, or in the softness between the legs. But then I would think about the graffiti, and the letters and the presents and I would put “must try harder” on her flawless homework.

Her skirt got shorter and the space behind her eyes got blacker, but the sun withered my concern to scorn. The graffiti on the wall got bigger, and cruder and one day she wrote that she loved me with lipstick on my windows. The neighbours talked, probably, but I wouldn’t have understood them.

The presents got more elaborate – a pen with a gold nib, a cat, a lock of her hair. Sometimes, as I stared at the dirt on the ceilings, lying to myself in my dirty bed, I would think of calling her, of starting it. But I never did.

When I told her I was leaving the country, she told me she would cut her throat if I did. I tried to doubt her. The night before I left, Kev got a phone call. Kev said it was her brother, and that, basically, I was dead. The way he didn’t smile made me think I’d taken too much speed. That’s how I came to be hiding in the bushes in the garden of the restaurant opposite my flat at 4am, waiting for the taxi to the airport with my bags hidden behind the car parked crazily up the road. Everytime I heard a car, I didn’t know whether to jump out and hope it was the taxi, or hide further hoping I didn’t end up cleavered in the street. A car did pull up and a man I did not recognise did get out and he went up the steps, past the graffiti into my flat. The taxi came and I was gone before he came out. And, as I never spoke to Kev again, I never did find out whether it was her brother. But my mother got no more phone calls.
(sirolimus, Mon 4 Feb 2008, 13:10, 10 replies)

Great
*click* for the sweaty, paranoid, noir thriller.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Mon 4 Feb 2008, 13:20, closed)

What I want to know
is if this is an existing (and well known) b3tan with an alternative account....

I have my suspicions.
( chickenlady b3ta's very own Elizabeth Taylor, Mon 4 Feb 2008, 13:31, closed)

No I'm not anyone else
I think that everyone else on the internet is not actually everyone else, at all. Rather, they are one bored man, sat alone in a bedsit in hull. I've thought that since about 1998, and I'm not about to change my mind now. But I'm not them. I'm me.
(sirolimus, Mon 4 Feb 2008, 13:39, closed)

Worth a click just for...

...nutella!
(Che Grimsdale Best before:, Mon 4 Feb 2008, 13:40, closed)

Ah..
You have me there.

I am actually a bored man in a bedsit in Hull. Anyone that has met me can confirm this.
( chickenlady b3ta's very own Elizabeth Taylor, Mon 4 Feb 2008, 14:28, closed)

^'tis true^

( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Mon 4 Feb 2008, 14:37, closed)

well
Well then you're an actress hired by him in an attempt to disuade people that the entire interent is not just one man with a million tabs open in his firefox.
(sirolimus, Mon 4 Feb 2008, 14:38, closed)

Does evryone live in fucking Hull these days ?
I thought I was the only one
( willenium Fist bump for verification, Mon 4 Feb 2008, 16:44, closed)

We all
get our ticket to hull on b3fa...... eventually
( baw__bag contains traces of nuts on, Mon 4 Feb 2008, 19:58, closed)

I love you Charles
I really, really do!
(Jugular, Wed 6 Feb 2008, 11:21, closed)