(As the links to the right of my blog will reveal, I am part of a writers' group. We have monthly assignments that we can contribute and the fiction below is a response to one of the topics. The task involved writing about "an empty room, a window and a chair". My imagination produced the work below.)
“I’m here to look at the room.” Raine told the punk who answered her knock.
His pale face registered bewilderment.
“I’m meeting Rob Jamieson.”
“Ah, you’re a friend of Robbie’s. He hasn’t moved in yet.”
The slumped black-adorned figure suddenly became animated, “Knew him at boarding school. Great guitarist.”
He led her towards a large empty room.
“Biggest in the house.” He enthused. “I’ve got an upstairs bedroom. Shared kitchen and bathroom.”
They stood in the doorway. An incongruous pair. Michelle Phillips and Sid Vicious.
Raine wondered if he knew the Mamas and the Papas.
“Was it a lounge room?” She asked.
“Dunno. Look. Gotta go. Uni assignment to finish.” He sauntered off.
She wondered what uni course an anarchist would choose.
Raine looked into the room. There was a three pane window overlooking an unkempt garden and Milton Road.
A bay window, she decided. Not that she knew for certain. There were no bay windows in the suburb where she grew up.
She scanned the rest of the room and was surprised to find an abandoned chrome and vinyl chair, in good condition, in a corner.
“Surplus to requirement.”
A term used at her day job when returning stock.
She decided that the previous tenant, now graduated from uni, could afford more refined furniture.
“Move in with me.” Rob had insisted.
She examined Rob’s new residence. The floor boards were bare and grubby. The smoke-stained walls harboured the ghosts of posters long removed.
“You don’t love Barry.”
It wasn’t a question. Rob was 18 and certain about everything.
He was right and it was the reason why she had succumbed to her sexual attraction to the beautiful young Rob shortly after he joined the band.
There was no guilt. She was no longer the besotted 17 year old who’d caught the eye of the lead singer. Barry added her to his band when he found that she could carry a tune.
They had been living together for seven years now and it had become more of an arrangement than a relationship.
Raine knew her place.
She, like Michelle Phillips, had a sweet but somewhat weak voice. And she, like Michelle Phillips, was attractive, a drawcard for the male audience.
“He just wants to play covers on weekends. I want my own band, write my own songs. Music is my life.” Rob’s youthful enthusiasm was endearing. “I’ll buy a house in L.A. and London and Sydney. And you’ll be there.”
However, Raine knew that she would not be a part of his dream.
She didn’t like the new wave music and she believed that the punk movement was an excuse for middle class kids to dress up and act atrociously.
And she vividly recalled that look on Rob’s face when she questioned his lyrics and criticised his favourite songwriter.
It wasn’t disappointment or hurt. It was disdain.
Raine knew that, before too long, she would be surplus to requirement.
She tapped the doorway with the toe of her cork wedged sandal, unwilling to cross the threshold.
Fashion, not music, was her life.
The company had offered her a well paid management job in a new boutique opening in Indooroopilly Shoppingtown.
She’d seen a phone box at corner when she’d got off the bus.
Raine decided she would call her sister and ask if she could stay with her while she arranged a place of her own.
Michelle 2008 ©
Sunday, June 08, 2008
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