It's been a while since I last completed anything -- the pandemic has gotten to me more than I would like to think. However, this story came out of the blue and I actually wrote 12k words in one sitting. Once the idea was there, it just flowed out.
I don't actually know what this one is really about, it just... is.
I did try and write this in the British Vernacular, so the dialog is peppered with Britishisms (at least, what I remember; I haven't lived back home in over thirty years now, so my idioms might be a bit out of date.)
Here's a small glossary to help my colonial brethren.
Prat -- moron, idiot.
Friday Week -- a week on Friday.
Pants -- when something is a bit crap, it's 'pants'.
'Hoity Toity' -- imagining you are upper class.
'Manc's' -- short for Manchester.
Life Part 1 -- Rich Livingston
I remember the night I met Clarissa McDonald. I was at a wedding for a college friend, James Dupree. He was marrying the girl he'd been shacking up with the whole time we'd been in college, keeping it quiet from his parents, since they would never have approved of him being in a relationship with an Indian girl. Quite why, no one really knew. It's not like his parents were well off or hoity-toity or anything. They were just your garden variety unspoken and quiet racists, guilty of never having really been anywhere or expanded their world view beyond Bolton, where he came from. They had a little money, - his father managed a bunch of betting shops for a wealthy family who were rumored to be in some slightly dodgy business relationships, but you know what gossip is, particularly at the college level. No one really knows anything, but everyone likes to pretend they do.
Anyway, James had been a friend to me and for a year, he pretended to live with me. Well, he sort of did anyway. He maintained a room in the house I was living in but he was never there, unless The Parents were in town. Most of the time he was round Patricia's house, 'shagging the arse off her', as he put it. Patricia was a lovely dusky Indian girl, Manchester-born and raised, complete with accent. Initially, it was a bit disconcerting, hearing a Mancs accent coming out of a girl in a sari, but once you got past that, she was quite lovely. Friendly, outgoing, not at all ashamed of who she was, where she came from, or anything really. We were all a little bit in love with her I suppose, at one point or another. But she only had eyes for James.
Annnnyway. Yeah, so they were marrying. A relatively big do, in Manchester, and I was invited. It was, oh, three years from graduation? I think we'd have all been around twenty-five or twenty-six or something. Something like that.
I was living in London by then, starting my career as a financial analyst, on the ground floor. It was tough going; London is a wonderful city, full of exciting things going on and it's terrific, if you've got money. If you don't, well, it's like a buffet full of amazing stuff to eat that you can't touch. I was living in a ground floor flat in East London, just off the East Ham tube station. Very Indian area, but the people were nice and it wasn't that rough. Plus I liked a good curry and there were LOTS of those style restaurants around. My choice of career was less about a passion for the industry, - although, who doesn't love money? -- and more about what I felt I could easily get into and make a success at, that had at least some chance of financial success at if I put in the effort. Creative endeavors were never really my thing since I just don't have that gene. I can appreciate a good book or song, but I wouldn't even know where to start in terms of creating one. But I
was
good at being able to take information and stats and organizing it against a set of rules and then judging what the information told me.
Yes, I was one of those boring people who not only understood what the statistics professors were talking about, but could imagine it in their heads. Going into the money markets was pretty much inevitable for me. It was either that or being an economist, and I could never actually understand who paid an economist for their understanding? I mean it's great to understand the why of why the numbers end up being what they are, but who actually pays for that knowledge? I figured economists made money off writing books about economics more than anything.
I was still single, "preferring to play the field" as I loftily told people who asked, doing my best to mask the fact that I just couldn't seem to get a relationship to stick. It's not like I was particularly ugly or fat or stupid or had bad personal hygiene or couldn't dress myself. It was more like I just sucked at the relationship part. I didn't know the right questions to ask, or have the right interests, or, well, I don't honestly know, to be frank. If I knew, I'd try and change it. I never really had the courage to ask any of the girls who I dated more than once what the problem was. Pride, I suppose. Who wants to ask girls why they decided to dump you? That just seems like a path to depression and humiliation.
I'd had my share of sexual experiences, some better than others, but I never seemed to have the same kind of thing happening to me that some of the other lads in the office used to boast about on a Monday morning. I strongly suspected that some of them were making stuff up, but even if fifty percent of them were, the other fifty percent were doing things that never seemed to happen to me. No lonely women picked me up when hitchhiking to the Glastonbury concert, and then pulled off the motorway to do unspeakable things to my body. No, I just sat on the train, staring out the window and trying not to listen to some idiot making a very loud phone call, like everyone else. I never ended up locked in a rich woman's flat in Chelsea during a power cut, where she put out candles then disrobed slowly, tantalizing the guy telling the story, before making him see stars. I just sat in the dark looking at twitter on my phone, while the battery slowly died, that night.
Anyway, I don't want it to sound like I was, -- or am, -- a loser. Far from it. I had my adventures. I went downhill mountain biking in Scotland with some friends. I went on a tour of France on a motorbike with other friends. I even had a sideline, selling photos and videos to Shutterstock -- you know the sort of thing. A woman looking at a laptop, a guy making an omelet, the white cliffs of Dover. The sort of thing that websites buy when they need stock images. While they don't sell for much, if you have enough of them, you'd be surprised how much you can make a month for relatively little outlay. A decent camera, the time to set stuff up; you'd have to be a pro photographer these days to do this. And I'm far from a pro. I do this purely for the money, not because I'm any kind of artiste with a camera. It's purely a sideline that pays my car payment when I have a good month.
So yeah, I have friends, I get out, I have my hobbies. Just not massively successful with the ladies and to compensate I'm spending a lot more time at the office, trying to get a leg up on the competition. As I explained to people who really pried, "I don't have time for a full-time relationship right now. Establish the career first, then relationship later, when I can devote time to it, appropriately." Yeah, it's all complete pompous bollocks, and I don't think anyone really bought it either, but it was at least
an
answer without me looking like Billy-no-mates, and I could then change the subject.
So there I was, Richard Livingston, twenty-six, sitting at the bar at this wedding, itching the collar of the slightly-too-tight shirt and desperately wishing they wouldn't water down the drinks quite as much as they were. Open bar, -- inevitable really, but still. They weren't serving pulled pints and as such, I had decided to move to bottled beer from the gin and tonic I was drinking that I wasn't sure had even been in sight of a gin bottle, let alone had the contents of the bottle touch it.
I wasn't part of the wedding party; James and I were friends, but not that good friends, - and while I knew a fair number of people there, James' circle of friends had enlarged a fair bit and I didn't have that much in common with the other university people I did know. We'd done the whole "Oh, what are you doing now?" questions, with all the pretend fascination that people express, and then been lost for stuff to talk about. Some of them had gotten married, one set had kids, just... no commonality to talk about. I ended up at the bar, sitting there in this monkey suit, smiling falsely at everyone and wondering when I could leave decently without it being seen as 'a poor show' by the poor sod who just got hitched.
I was just consoling myself that at least it wasn't a full-on, three-day Indian wedding, and asking the barman for a bottle of Stella Artois when she plonked herself down on the spare stool next to me. I glanced at her and had to force myself to look back at the barman. I mean, talk about knockout. Once you start looking, it's hard not to stare. And for once, I was going to play it cool. Sure I was. I wasn't desperately trying not to look like a goldfish out of the bowl, not me. No, cool, calm and collected. That's what I was. Suuurrrrre.
Clarissa Anne McDonald (I would learn of the Anne part later), had shortish brown chestnut hair, very silky and full. I mean, just the hair alone looked like it had just walked out of hair advert. Wide cheekbones, full red lips, wide smile, which usually showed lots of perfectly aligned teeth. Smaller eyes than you would have thought, and pencil-thin eyebrows, but she pulled it off. Definitely someone you'd look twice at. Three times, in fact. Maybe even four, if she didn't catch you at it. She had the ability, when engaged with you, to give you her full attention. She didn't glance around, or fidget, or have body language that wasn't engaged with you. She faced you full-on, paid attention and watched your eyes.
Of course, now I know why, but back then it was a new thing. She could make you feel like you were interesting. Worth her time. I mean that was a massive ego boost for me when she deigned to focus her attention on me.
She ordered a gin and tonic, and I winced when she did so, and she said, "What's up? Is the gin crap or something?"
I leaned in, even though it wasn't noisy, and whispered, "Get a double. It's watered down."
"Ahhh," she replied, tapping her nose in the age old, 'I understand' move. "Gotcha. Will do. Thanks for the tip."
She ordered and then swung around on the swivel stool, stocking-clad legs crossed over each other, the tight green sheath dress she was wearing rode up a little, and as I look back now, I'm pretty sure she knew it.
"Hi," she said, offering her hand. "I'm Clarissa. But if we end up friends, you can call me Risa. Most people do. Clarissa is just terribly snooty, don't you think?"
That was a hard one to answer correctly. On the one hand, agreeing with her that her name was snooty was not the way to a lifelong friendship. On the other, disagreeing with the first conversational tidbit offered, wasn't the way forward either.
