I got the text from Jenny on Tuesday.

You probably want some background. She’s five foot something with fairish hair, and she works as a photographer.

We’ve never met. Okay, I’m lying, we have met. I lie a lot. I don’t mean to. Well, I do mean to. If I tell you I’m unemployed and don’t have any money, you probably wouldn’t want to know me. If I tell you I’m a poor student doctor and don’t have any money, you probably would. That’s why people lie. There are lots of reasons to lie and all of them are good reasons. This story’s true though.

I met Jenny five years ago. We fucked for two weeks twice a day and then I grew bored, bought her a webcam, and sent her home. I prefer it that way. You don’t have to talk or pretend you’re interested afterwards with a web cam. You just lean over and switch it off.

Sometimes she gets bored with the arrangement and disappears for a few months. She always says the same thing in her farewell email: you don’t respect me; you’re just using me; you’re a robot; you need to seek urgent professional help.

About four weeks later I get a follow up email that says she’s in Geneva, Brussels, New York, Sydney or somewhere else with her new boyfriend. They’re very happy together and she hopes there are no hard feelings. She also hopes that I find someone soon who’ll brighten up my life the way Mark, Stephen, Brad, or Phillip has brightened up hers.

Between two and four weeks after that I get a view-webcam invite.

I like the way her brain works. It’s mathematical. It’s numerical. It’s arithmetically sexual in that she likes onesomes, twosomes, threesomes, foursomes, and moresomes. She has a good head for numbers I would say. I’ve watched these combinations from the comfort of my swivel chair. Sometimes I direct the action because I have a microphone. I’m a very good director.

Anyway, Tuesday I got a text saying that she was back in Glasgow for the weekend but would be travelling to London next day and did I fancy meeting her before she went.

I paced up and down for many minutes thinking. I surprised myself by texting back that I did want to meet her. I immediately regretted it but by then it was too late. The idea of her in my flat in the flesh was freaking me out. It felt like I would be messing with reality or bending the space time continuum like they do in sci-fi shows from the sixties.

I don’t know what was going through my head but when she texted back with an address I picked up my car keys and drove down to the fancy flats that overlook the river at Partick. My car’s an old car and it makes a groaning noise when I apply the brakes. People always turn round and point when I come to a stop. Sometimes it doesn’t really stop but overshoots a bit at the lights. Children always look scared when this happens—these children wearing their mother’s faces. I look at the mum and the two children and they’re all wearing the same face and then I become freaked out too and drive off.

It’s a Japanese car. My mum’s debt collector was a Japanese prisoner of war and he hated them. He told her he would never buy a Japanese car as he took her money and put it in a cash pouch.

They were building a great warship in the dock yards across the way and while I waited for Jenny I could see the welders working with sparks flying in the dark. When it was finished the Queen would come, hit a bottle of champagne off its bow, and say “God bless H.M.S. Mark, Stephen, Brad, or Phillip and all who sail on her.”

When Jenny climbed into the car it lurched to one side. Both our heads tilted to the left then righted. The rain lashed off the windscreen and she smelled damp. I turned on the heater then began our journey through the tenement town.

“You still taking photographs?”

She sighed and lit a cigarette.

“No, I gave that up; remember I told you?”

I shook my head and then she shook hers.

“I’m now working as a carer, pushing a wheelchair bound lady around for money and cleaning her backside.”

I put on the indicator and turned right up Crow Road. I couldn’t imagine having to clean the shit from someone’s backside for money. It would start to dominate my life. Days later I’d be walking down the street smelling my fingers. I’d start to hate the person and maybe even hit them whenever it happened. I don’t have the patience of a saint. I don’t even have the patience of a sinner.

It made me wonder about human dignity and whether there was any point hanging onto a life that had hung you out to dry so spectacularly.

“I remember now,” I said, “Last time we spoke you told me you were in Sweden with her.”

“That’s right, she was dancing in Sweden.”

I took the cigarette from her fingers and threw it out of the window. Cigarettes led to infirmity and ass wiping.

“How can someone in a wheelchair dance?”

“She goes onto the floor with the other dancers and moves her head a little.”

We moved through the junction at Anniesland Cross and past the solitary high rise. In the solitary high rise people led solitary lives staring out of windows from behind net curtains. They sighed a lot and sat on worn out sofas. I wondered if they sat down on different seats like I did to give the impression there were other people in the room. Sometimes I made up my own people and sat them on seats with jackets and hats and a broomstick for a spine. I’ve never told anyone that before.

We went up Bearsden Road, and then right past the canal towards Maryhill which is where I live. It’s dark and empty on this stretch of road and I thought how easy it would be to do something stupid—not because it was right or wrong, or because she deserved it or not, or because I even wanted to, but because it would be easy.

“I’ve got a boyfriend called Mark now. I was going to tell you.”

I won’t bore you with the turning keys bit, or the interior of the tenement I call home or what she said when she looked inside my flat. All that shit is inconsequential. She liked my teas, though. I bought myself a big box of world teas for Christmas and she liked those. She took a long time to decide which one she was going to have. Then she chose Assam.

I’m very good at small talk and was going to tell her that even though Assam is Indian it was a Scottish explorer called Robert Bruce who discovered it. I suppose the Indians had discovered it first but then it depended which side of the looking glass you were on. Just like when Columbus discovered America and the other Indians might have said we already knew it was here. I reckoned when we finally found alien life on another planet they’d be called Indians, too.

It was obvious we’d dominate these new Indian Aliens as I read in a book once that because Earth was a small planet, with small gravitational pull, it meant that we grew big. Most other planets were larger, so other life forms would be shrunken specimens in comparison. This made me happy as I am short and therefore wanted to be a giant somewhere in the universe.

When she’d finished her tea, she put the cup down and said she’d best go get ready. Fourteen minutes and twelve seconds later she came out topless wearing suspenders and a short skirt. She was holding a laptop. I nodded and headed into my computer room.

# # #

Jenny by Andrew McLinden
originally published in the Summer 2012 print edition

 

 


Andrew McLinden likes referring to himself in the third person. He sometimes walks into a supermarket and says to the checkout girl “Andrew wants to know if these cakes are part of the two for one deal you’re currently promoting?” On a recent rendezvous with a girl he’d met off an internet dating site he was heard to remark “Andrew thinks you used someone else’s photograph on your profile.” Andrew likes to read and likes to write and hopes people like to read what he writes.

For more of Andrew's work,
visit his Big Pulp author page

 

This feature and more great
fiction & poetry are available in
Big Pulp Summer 2012:
The Purloined Pearl

Purchase books and subscriptions
in the Big Pulp book store!

 

 

Purchase books and subscriptions
in the Big Pulp book store!

 

Store ø Blog ø Authors ø Supporters ø Submissions ø About ø Exter Press ø Home
Art gallery ø Movies ø Fantasy ø Mystery ø Adventure ø Horror ø Science Fiction ø Romance

All fiction, poems and artwork © the authors. Big Pulp © 2012 Exter Press