Hey guys, first draft so really would REALLY appreciate any comments/criticism/ideas. It is a whole story, not just a first chapter in case there is any confusion. 3,500 words, but I like to think interesting enough to justify the length.
It is a cold winter’s night, a strong wind is blowing. There is a large highway that runs down to the coast, three lanes each way, and tonight it is busy. An ugly concrete bridge spans the highway at one point, so rarely used that one wonders why it was built in the first place. From this bridge you can see the highway stretch into the distance, the headlights winding through the night. If one knows where to look, and has keen eyes one can even see the lights of Melbourne, though it is hardly an impressive sight from such a distance. It is dizzying to think of all the cars rushing past, the various thoughts and desires of the drivers. From this bridge everything looks so uniform and drab, it is easy to forget that each car is driven by someone unique, with their own reasons for driving on this hostile night. Unfortunately, nearly everyone who drives under this bridge will remain a mystery to us, but there is one person driving tonight that we will come to know. A grey Corolla slows as it approaches the bridge and pulls over, it is the driver of this car that we are concerned with, it is because of him that we were waiting above this lonely highway. The driver of the Corolla is a young man in a dark Jacket. On the back seat of his car is a bag stuffed with clothes, a toothbrush and a towel. The young man is alone in the car, on the front passenger seat their is a Melways, opened to the front page. The young man reaches for the Melways nervously. He thinks he is on the right road but he does not know this, a sign he just passed confused him. The Melways does not help him much, it is an old copy and many of the pages are stuck together. Wisely the young man decides to keep going, hoping to see a sign that will reassure him. He puts the car into gear, checks his rear vision mirror and pulls out onto the highway, the bridge out of sight in seconds. Now that we have seen the young man we remain with him, the bridge disappears from view without a backward glance. Inside the car is a nicer place to be anyway, we are glad to be gone.
The night draws on, the rain continues to beat down on the highway. Eventually the young man finds his turnoff, now he is on a winding beachside road. He pulls over again, urinates then pulls out his mobile, opening an old text message with an address in it. He is nearly there.
He is more animated as he drives now, tapping the steering wheel in time with the radio and smiling. Soon he will be with friends that he has not seen for some time. He pictures them as he drives. There is Chloe, loud, funny, hyperactive. He once knew her better than he know does, misunderstandings and boredom have come between them. Then there is Kyle, quieter, more thoughtful but lately more restless. Recently the young man has realized that Kyle is dissatisfied, but he does not know with what. Lastly there is Laura. The young man has not seen Laura for around six months. She has a boyfriend that he hasn’t met, he heard from Chloe that she was bringing him down.
At last he has found the driveway but again he is unsure if he is in the right place. This uncertainty is a common reoccurrence in the young man. A constant voice asking whether he is on the right track, whether he has overlooked some fatal flaw.
He pulls out his mobile, finds Chloe’s number.
“Number forty five yeah?” He asks, “The long overgrown driveway.”
“Luke!” Chloe sounds drunk and over-excited. “Yeah that’s the one, it’s a long driveway but just keep coming up.”
Now he knows he is on the right driveway he regrets having rung. He would have enjoyed turning up unannounced, the pride of knowing he had found the house on this dark night without any help.
The house is owned by Chloe’s grandparents, a rich old couple who apparently used to own half of E-----. It is an old wooden beach house, full of small rooms with brown walls. The walls are covered with pictures of dead relatives, drawings by Chloe and her brothers from when she was little and the usual tide charts and pictures of the sea that can be found in any beach house. It is an intensely personal house, over the next few days Luke will feel that he has come to know a side of Chloe that he was not aware of before He will try to imagine a young Chloe playing in this old house and he will be pleased with himself when he thinks he can.
Luke parks the Corolla next to Kyle’s. he smiles briefly as he remembers the parties that Kyle used to ferry people to in the old station wagon, people drinking casks of cheap white wine in the back seat. As he approaches the house he can hear Chloe. She is putting on some voice, imitating some long forgotten character from a movie Luke has never seen. Luke pushes open the door and is inside, surrounded by warmth and people. It is a nice feeling to travel through a hostile night into the arms of friends.
Some time has passed, maybe six hours or so. Luke and Chloe sit alone in the kitchen, everyone else has gone to bed. Both are slightly drunk and tired. The kitchen table between them is covered with empty bottles and unwashed dishes. Luke is reminded of an idea he had once told Chloe about. He had wanted to sit at a table opposite Chloe with a large amount of alcohol. Both would start drinking keeping talking to a minimum. There would be no music, nothing to distract them from the sensation of getting drunk. He had never known why he had wanted to do this exactly. It had been during a time when he had felt a real need to get to the bottom of things. Back then he had felt that it was possible to understand things properly, one just needed to look at them in isolation. He had felt Chloe had not understood though. She was sick at the time anyway and had been banned from drinking any alcohol for three months. By the time she got better they had already started to drift apart, and Luke no longer felt it was possible to understand much.
Now they sit opposite each other quietly. They know that they will soon start talking, and what will be said will probably be deep and meaningful, as Chloe likes to say, but neither feels any particular hurry to begin. There is a mutual affection here, but also a wariness. They enjoy each others company, but somehow both feel slightly wronged by each other. Chloe feels Luke has abandoned her, she blames him for the fact that they have drifted apart. This may be true, but Luke feels it was a result of Chloe refusing to change that hurt their friendship. Although Luke never would say this, he sometimes sees Chloe’s continued teen age behaviour as a personal rejection of him. It is as if with every story about a frivolous infatuation or night drinking herself to oblivion at some old school friends house, Chloe is choosing to remain in a world that Luke can no longer enter.
“Well Lukey, are you enjoying yourself?”
“Lukey.” Chloe has taken to calling him that lately, often with a slightly sarcastic twinge.
“Yeah, it’s been a fun night.” Luke’s answer is evasive, it reserves him the right to go home tomorrow.
“What do you think of Laura’s boyfriend?”
“Yeah, he seems cool.”
Chloe sticks her front lip out slightly and her voice drops a few tones, her way of impersonating men.
“Yeah, he seems cool,” she parrots, making Luke appear pathetically masculine and stupid with his guarded politeness. Long ago Luke had a weakness for Laura, and Chloe enjoys trying to find traces of jealousy or affection in the way Luke talks about her.
“And how are you Chloe?” The question is both defensive and sympathetic.
“Yeah, not too bad.” They both know that in many ways she is not, but Luke is prepared to let the matter rest for now. They continue to talk, the hostility decreases, at one point they realize they are both cold and they move to in front of the fire, warming their hands side by side. It is perhaps the increased intimacy of the situation that prompts Chloe to confide in Luke.
“You know, I’ve actually been diagnosed with a mental disorder recently.” Luke is shocked but wary, he knows Chloe is prone to being dramatic.
“What?”
“Guess.”
His mind is blank, he is tired and drunk.
“OCD?”
She smiles sadly for a second to let him know he is an idiot.
“No, an eating disorder, it has been pretty bad lately.”
“Bulimia.”
She nods slowly.
Typical, you don’t have the self discipline to be anorexic.
The thought surprises him and he quickly represses it, though he knows that a small part of him will always think that.
“That sucks, I had no idea.”
“Yeah, it really sucks.”
Later on he puts his arm around her, and they sit silently staring into the fire.
The next day is overcast. They wake one by one, Luke first even though he went to bed last. Everyone is listless, they clean the house slowly and play a few board games. There is another girl there, Miriam, that Luke does not know. She is a friend of Kyle’s, an American backpacker he met at his work. Kyle is heading away soon to New Zealand, he seems desperate to get out of Melbourne. Luke notices that this girl seems interested in Kyle but he is either oblivious or doesn’t care. At one stage Luke goes to the shops with Kyle and decides to ask him about it.
“I’m glad you’re here,” says Kyle grumpily as he drives. “I can’t deal with all these girls by myself.”
“What about Miriam? She seems sort of into you.”
“Who cares?”
Every word Kyle says seems to scream dissatisfaction and boredom. He is keen to travel, to become someone new, to test himself. It is a common weariness that seems to affect many young men, post school blues is the name Luke has given it in his head . He wants to tell Kyle that going away won’t solve all his problems. that he shouldn’t be so hard on himself and his friends. That he should try his luck with Miriam tonight, it might cheer him up. Instead he picks up the I-pod from the floor and changes the song, in seconds Cat Power’s sleepy voice fills the silence.
That night they play a game of five hundred, Chloe and Luke against Laura and Kyle. This is an old tradition amongst this group of friends, Luke does not care to think how many hours he has spent playing this game. Luke and Chloe usually make a good team. They have signals for different hands, pulling your collar means you have the joker, while touching your earlobe means one of the bowers. Tonight however, they struggle to find their rhythm. Chloe over bets and looses a hand, then Luke misses a big call by one after misplaying the last three cards. Kyle and Laura play conservatively and well. Laura sits with her boyfriend Andrew beside her, she tries to teach him the game but he is not that interested. Miriam listens to music and talks to Chloe as she plays. She knows how to play, but senses that she would be intruding if she joined in. Between a hand Chloe leans back in her chair, she is disappointed with the game.
“Did you see that old house as you drove in Luke?”
“the one on the right at the top of the hill?”
“Yeah.”
“What about it?”
“It’s been abandoned for years now, there is this crazy old guy who owns and says he is going to renovate it, but he hasn’t got around to it.”
“Yeah? You think you could sell that land for a fair bit.”
“It’s a pretty creepy old building, it would be cool to have a look around inside it.”
The game continues, but gradually people lose focus. Everyone is drinking, too much and too quickly. Kyle goes to the kitchen and starts to mix cocktails, Laura’s boyfriend Andrew follows. Luke feels the night has reached a tipping point, he can either stop drinking now or get really trashed. He looks around the room at the empty bottles of alcohol, the cards scattered across the table and feels a depressing sense of de ja vue. This was the sort of stuff that used to depress him last year when he saw a lot of these guys, the feeling that everything they had to say to each other had already been said, and all that was left was to try saying it in a drunk way. “Fuck it.” He thinks. He will only mope around being boring if he doesn’t drink.
“How much of that slab do you have left Kyle?”
Later that night Laura, Chloe and Luke dance in a drunken circle in the middle of the living room. For a while they are completely un self conscious, caught up in the moment and each other.
“WE SHOULD HANG OUT MORE OFTEN.” Laura shouts at Luke over the music, cheeks flushed and smiling.
“I THINK YOU SAID THAT LAST TIME I SAW YOU.”
“DID I? WELL I WAS RIGHT!”
It is a common pattern between Luke and Laura, but they both know it is unlikely they will see each other until the next time Chloe organizes something.
Once again everyone has gone to bed but Luke. He sits in front of the fire, tapping his foot nervously. Kyle was quiet and bored tonight. He payed no attention to Miriam but drank a large amount of alcohol. He is flying away in four days, Luke hopes for his sake that he will be gone a long time. Chloe was her loud self as usual, but now that he was looking for it Luke noticed the desperate hysteria behind everything she said. Luke regrets having came down, he would drive back now if he wasn’t still drunk. While he enjoyed himself earlier tonight, the cloying sense of claustrophobia that he often feels when he is with his old friends is suddenly all around him. He feels that it was misplaced nostalgia more than anything that made him come down in the first place. Suddenly Luke stands and walks out of the house. He almost runs to his car and opens the back door, scrabbling around on the floor for a torch. Once he has found one he turns and heads up the hill away from the beach house. It is another hostile night, the sound of his footsteps are drowned by gusts of wind. The old house that Chloe mentioned is easy to find, a dark mass on the skyline. It is smaller than Chloe’s beachhouse, an old weather board with an outdoor toilet. Luke is freaked out, he does not usually do this sort of thing but he is feeling reckless tonight. He peers in the window, sees a kitchen table with a few bottles of wine sitting on it. He slowly walks around the side of the house then stops dead in shock, the door has been half torn off it’s hinges. Now Luke is breathing hard. Something about the doors buckled frame has scared him. He stands posed just outside, willing himself to go on. Suddenly he is reminded of Kyle, that bored passive restlessness. For some reason this strengthens his resolve. Breathing deeply, he squeezes past the buckled door into the abandoned house.
Standing just inside the door, painfully aware of his loud breathing, Luke’s eyes gradually become accustomed to the gloom. He is standing in a small room outer room, to his right is a hallway down to what looks like a laundry, in front of him is a glass door, through which he can see the kitchen he looked in at earlier. He steps forward slowly, his feet make squelching noises on the old muddy lino. The kitchen door is locked, which somehow adds to his unease. Bending down, he notices that the glass is cracked in many places. He pushes with his finger on the glass and a shard pops out, falling into the kitchen. He works around the window, pulling the glass out of the frame shard by shard and dropping them onto the floor. Soon he has a hole big enough to step through, and he is inside the kitchen. His torch darts around the room, taking in the bottles of wine on the table, old empty cupboards and a pile of faded once cent pieces on the kitchen sink. The kitchen opens up to an inner hallway, which has a living room and bathroom on one side, and two small bedrooms on the other. Luke moves methodically through each room, first the living room and bathroom, then the two bed rooms No-one has bothered to clean the house out, cobwebbed clothes, board games and bottles of shampoo all remain as reminders of the past owners. Unlike all the other rooms, the last bedrooms door is shut. Luke pauses outside it, aware for the first time how silent it is in the house. Feeling for the doorknob he slowly swings the door open, then stops dead. Lying on the only bed is a dark mass, and Luke notices that the room is filled with the pungent odour of unwashed skin. The dark mass stirs, woken by the creaking of the door and a face glares at Luke out of the gloom. For a second they stare at each other in silence, then Luke steps backward out of the room.
“It’s ok, I’m leaving. Go back to sleep.”
Luke closes the door and walks quickly back up the corridor, his ears straining to hear any sound of pursuit. He reaches the kitchen and steps hurriedly through the opening he made in the glass door, slicing a hole in his jeans on a protruding glass shard in his panic. Then he is outside, running back down the hill to Chloe’s beach house.
When dawn breaks Luke is lying in bed, staring at the ceiling. He knows he should probably get some sleep, he has not slept enough over the last few days but his mind races, the image of the old man glaring at him out of the gloom refuses to leave his mind. He thinks about what it would be like breaking into an abandoned house to sleep, lying in the dark never knowing who might walk in the door. He wonders if any of his friends will ever sink that low, tries to imagine Chloe glaring up at him out of the gloom but fails. It is too distant, worlds away. Suddenly Luke is very tired. It has been a stressful couple of days, he has drunk and worried far too much. He swings his feet of the side of the bed and pads barefoot into the kitchen. As usual the kitchen table is covered, glasses, dirty dishes, cigarette lighters and a mixing bowl containing the leftovers from a joint. He hunts around for a clean glass, can’t find one, gives up and rinses one out filled with stale orange juice and vodka. He drinks two glasses of water, then for safety half a red bull he finds in the fridge. In a draw in the living room, untouched by the teen-age chaos he finds a pen and some paper.
Hey guys, thought I’d beat the traffic home today. Have fun in New Zealand Kyle, see you when you get back.
His bag is basically packed, he kept most of his stuff in it anyway. Two trips to the car and he is ready to leave, his engine kills the morning tranquillity. When he has reached the top of the hill he stops, leaving the engine running he gets out of the car and walks once again up to the abandoned house. He pulls fifty dollars from his wallet and slides it under the door. He knows it might be lost in the muddy lino but it is the best he is prepared to do.
The Corolla does not stop when it passes the bridge but suddenly we are left behind, straining to distinguish the unremarkable grey car from all the others that are streaming towards Melbourne. Later in the day Kyle’s car will pass, and if we stick around for another day we will even see the old man, slumped against the window of a Greyhound bus. But that is all we are destined to see, and soon the cars that pass underneath us are once again all cut off from us, and in a way our brief window into the lives of a couple of confused teenagers only makes our time on the bridge lonelier.
