The Captive



  THE CAPTIVE

  A fiction short story by

  A Sugarman

  Published by A Sugarman

  Copyright 2015 A Sugarman

  Current fiction:

  Redirected Male

  From Upholstered Battlements

  Fantasy titles coming soon:

  Onchan’s Bane

  The Orb of Piralak

  THE CAPTIVE

  A broken foot has its good and bad points really. I’ll start with the bad. The pain, obviously, is the main drawback. That, and the chance I’ll wear out all my left shoes.

  Then there is the embarrassment. Hands up anyone who can say that they broke their foot after being in collision with a child on a Mickey Mouse tricycle?

  The good points? Being off work for a few months, way too much chocolate, biscuits and television. What about being waited on, I bet you’re thinking. I live alone, for the most part, in my apartment. Honestly? It’s a case of six of one and half a dozen of the other really.

  Three days confined to my home has left my armchair and footstool with Pat-shaped indentations, that no amount of plumping will cure. Tell you what, I’ll take you through what’s becoming an average day.

  I hear the door to my ground floor apartment open and an all too familiar voice calls out.

  “Patrick, it’s me, your mother.”

  Calling me Patrick, who else would it be? “Hi, mum, I’m still in the lounge.”

  There’s a few seconds of delay as she hangs her coat up, then she hustles into the room.

  My mum is, officially, known to be businesslike and efficient in all that she does. Unofficially, by persons who shall remain nameless – because I am one of them, she is heroically irritating in her need to have things done ‘properly’. Always your way, she’ll have you believe, but with her ‘guidance’.

  “You really should lock your door, dear, I could have been a burglar.”

  I should be so lucky, I’d have sent him out for chocolate…and crutches.

  “And what about giving me a key, Patrick?”

  And that’s going to happen. “Cath has my spare-”

  “I’m your mother, Patrick, and you prefer to give your spare key to your girlfriend?”

  Images of mum walking in on me naked as I come out of the shower, me and Cath in an ‘intimate’ embrace and mum seeing my tattoo of a serpent coiling round an almost dressed damsel parade before my eyes. I blink away the horrifying images. Cath is better with the key, but even that has drawbacks, as you’ll see.

  Now,” said mum, sitting on my sofa and placing a large bag on the floor before her, “I have a big bottle of Lucozade -”

  Which I loathe.

  “- chicken soup –“

  Which makes me feel sick.

  “-and one of those new battery-powered air fresheners. Arctic Glacier, I think…” She rummages in her bag. “Yes, Arctic Glacier.”

  Wonderful. My own mum thinks I’m festering away in convalescence.

  “The apartment is fine, mum. Cath dusted and hovered through, and opened the windows to let fresh air in.”

  “Yes….”

  A nice inoffensive way of saying she doesn’t think it was done properly. Stretch the word out and sound doubtful. Better than coming right out and saying what you think.

  “Did you get me a bar of chocolate?”

  “No, no. You’ll get a mid-riff like your father. I’d simply die of embarrassment if I had you both resting your pints of beer on your bellies. Bronwyn, your cousin, has her twenty-first at the Lodge soon. She’s having blue and white sprays on the tables, and her boyfriend’s dad, the chief of police, is coming.”

  She looks at me in a way that says she she would die of mortal shame if I so much as got fat fingers.

  “No, no, I couldn’t bear the sight.”

  I’m one of those annoying individuals whose body refuses to gain weight, no matter what I eat. I actually lost a kilo over Christmas. Cath added an extra gym session to her schedule to deal with the seasonal excess. And a three day ‘intimate’ relations ban because my lack of weight gain was bad for her morale! For something I had no control over!

  “Have you been taking the pain tablets the doctor gave you? You look a bit pale.”

  “I look pale because I lost blood in the operation, mum. And yes, I am taking the pain pills.”

  “And resting?”

  “What choice do I have? Two days at home and the hospital still can’t get me any crutches.”

  Mum begins rearranging my ornaments.

  “A travesty, that’s what our health service has become. I tell you what I’ll do, Patrick. I’ll bring down Grandad’s walking stick.”

  “I thought his gout was playing up, so he’ll need it?”

  “Not at all. He’s just playing the martyr so he can stay in and watch Wimbledon.”

  I hope the old lad realises how much interference he’ll get…on second thoughts, the more mum is there, the less she’ll be here! “You should keep an eye on him, mum. He could fall.”

  Mum doesn’t hear, she’s left the room. Out of sight I can hear her in the hall cupboard.

  “Mum, what are you doing?”

  My hoover starts up.

  Mum shouts, “Just a quick spin, Patrick.”

  Nothing about my mum is quick. Thorough, but not quick.

  “You don’t want it to look untidy when I bring your Aunt Emma over this afternoon.”

  I shudder. Aunt Emma means one thing…cross-stitch. With nothing else for it I crank up the volume on the TV.

  Television, the last retreat of a dumbed-down generation. When you really think about it, how many really good programmes have any of us watched recently? Memorable stuff that made you laugh or cry? Our parents readily submitted to a routine of work, eat and sleep. This last few generations can now claim a new routine of work, eat, TV, sleep.

  Why, why do we sit and watch mindless drivel? Worse, mindless drivel about people with more money than us, who buy houses, cars and holiday homes like money has a use-by date a few days hence.

  How about a programme about carpenters. In Venice. Who make parts for gondolas? I caught such a thing on my first day back home. It was narrated by a woman who had such a monotone voice, that she’d have made the perfect role model for train station announcers.

  Three solid days of it was seeing my endurance fail under a landslide of house-based scheduling. House selling, renovating and cleaning is giving me the urge to buy a cabin on a mountain to escape…but even then subliminal urges would persist, probably culminating in laminated floors, minimalist décor and decking that would make Tommy proud.

  Two hours pass as I doze. I’m nearly fully asleep when the door opens and a rustling mass of shopping bags topped with dyed-blond hair sweeps into the room.

  “Hi, Pat.”

  It’s my girlfriend. “Cath.., what’s all this?” There are bags everywhere.

  “I told you. I’m staying over this weekend to look after you.”

  “One bag would be enough fo-”

  “Oh, no. I must have a selection for Saturday so I don’t clash with anyone.”

  “Saturday… I’m in no state to go anywhere.”

  “No, no. The girls and me. Seems a waste to visit the city and not do the bars and clubs.”

  I watch her rush out. Charming. She lives twenty odd miles away, so I guess I can come close to understanding her excitement… if I try very, very hard. We’re fond of each other, but I wonder if I can compete with a whole metropolis. I mean, how many people do you know who own twenty-eight pairs of jeans? Cath does. I own three, and one of them is only used for DIY and crawling under my car.

  Cath reappears and a toiletries ca
se the size of a pirate treasure chest thumps onto the floor beside the bags. I’ve seen this before. Make-up artists on film sets would go green after a peek inside. Deep within its bowels are small, but hideously expensive, wrinkle decrease creams, all night face creams, face cleansers, pore rejuvenators – all proclaiming miracle ingredients that we’ve never heard of, but believe to be the next breakthrough. They could just be using the pieces of a Scrabble board to come up with the names for all we know.

  They deal with crows feet, laughter lines, brow furrows and all other skin imperfections that having emotions and a life hand out. Cath is twenty-four. God help the rest of us ‘oldies’. I saw an advert the other day that showed a beautiful woman failing to notice a man because he had the cardinal sin of greying hair!

  Men are anatomically built to age well, as long as they stay clear of beer and cigarettes. Among the most fancied men in the world are people like Sean Connery and George Cloony. They both have grey hair…

  Oh, I got you this,” said Cath, bounding back into the room.

  She puts a seventy-five gram bar of Dairy Milk on the arm of my chair, and smiles as though she has just told me I have won the lottery. A bulletin sign flashes through my head: ‘This bar has a five minute life span’. If I ration it like Robinson Cruesoe, it might last the day out. I smile, thinly.

  “Thanks.”

  She kisses me. “I’ll see you at about five, Pat.”

  And she’s gone in a sweet cloud of luridly expensive perfume.

  I glance at the phone, sat on my very useful occasional table next to my chair. Three days have passed since I got out of hospital. I have given up on the pointless expectation of waiting for my crutches, the kind we all had for the first year of the Lotto. The one that had us convinced that we would be the one sitting beside our neo-classical mansion sipping champagne by our pool, before a drive to the local supermarket in one of our ludicrously expensive and impractical supercars.

  If it wasn’t for the self-righteous feeling I am owed ‘free’ crutches for my national-insurance payments, I’d be on the net looking at sites like, ‘medicalsupplies.com’ or, ‘crutchesareus.net’ getting a pair delivered. After all, I can always sell them on Ebay to another luckless victim of NHS cuts afterwards.

  My cast resembles any of the numerous walls in our fair city, in the fact that it is littered with benign and offensive graffiti. Aren’t friends great… Mine has yellow and blue flowers painted by my eight year old niece. Numerous goodwill messages by my mates and family. From there it descends into lewd jokes and obscure anecdotes. ‘Break a leg’. ‘I see you got plastered…as usual’.

  There are things written on the back and sole of the cast, but my reverse writing lessons are going a little slowly to tell if I need a pot of Tipex, or tin of magnolia and a roller!. I’m also still waiting for a translation on one scrawl. Being bilingual is great, but who speaks Gaelic nowadays?

  I need the loo. Outside, the street is empty - midday in a cowboy western empty. I know, as is always the case, that it will fill the moment I move. How often have we been ‘indisposed’ when the deliveryman calls – usually with an essential item we have waited months for?

  The times we have a ‘quick’ shower, only to find half a dozen missed calls on our landlines and mobiles - usually accompanied by an irate/disappointed voice mail. I wonder how many relationships have died this one-sided death? More than once the postman has knocked to deliver a packet, only to be long gone before I had made the ten second dash from the kitchen to the front door. And that was when I was fully mobile!

  I look again. The street is still empty. This is ridiculous. I lever my body from the chair and hobble in a most undignified way to the loo.

  On my way back I see the note. It’s lying where it fell from the letterbox. With considerable awkwardness, and an epic sense of the inevitable, I make my way down the hall and read the note from six feet up. My crutches have been to visit, and left. Wrenching the door open I venture two hobbles onto the porch. A white fiesta is driving away with a cruel lack of speed. My crutches are clearly visible on the back seat, goading my failure.

  To the left, as I turn despondently back to my door, I see mum walking up the road. She has Aunt Emma with her. She, in turn, has a large sewing bag swinging ominously from a hand bearing needle-worn fingers. Needlepoint? No point! Pictures of flower sprays and teddy bears, maybe an Easter bunny – make me despair, even if it has the possibility of chocolate eggs. Better still, crossed crutches so I can add my own motto. Something in traditional Latin, something like, ‘Have crutches, will flee.’

  I pull my mobile from my pocket and phone the hospital about getting the driver to bring back my crutches.

  Hello? My name’s Patrick Greenway. I’ve just missed someone trying to drop off a set of crutches. Could you get them to come back? No? Can I have trauma care then?” Why? Because I’m about to be tortured with cross-stitch! Have you any idea what damage that will do? Hello…hello?”

  END

  Thank you for reading The Captive.

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  Feel free to enjoy my growing body of work, including the fiction novel Redirected Male and the short From Upholstered Battlements.