Bright Fires Burn Fastest Read online

  In a pub as busy as this they had found silence.

  “Well?” April pushed considering she had just said to an utter stranger.

  Lucas ran a hand through his hair, pulled on his beer for a couple of seconds and then met her eyes over the top of the glass.

  “Agreed”.

  April looked slightly soured, “You agree?”

  “What I mean”, Lucas said hurriedly realising this exquisite creature in front of him was not a pushover. “Its actually very refreshing. I mean, there’s so much bullshit”.

  “And what do you know of bullshit?”

  “I have been surrounded by it my entire life and within the last two weeks I have quit my job, punched my boss and ‘fucked his daughter’”.

  Interesting. That was the word that came to April’s mind. He was a total dick, but he knew it.

  Lucas laughed at everything this girl was. “Yeah, you are weird. We got our drinks. I know your name is April and you spout that.”

  “First impressions are always the most honest”.

  “How so?”

  “Well I decide within about a second whether I am going to fuck someone or not.”

  Lucas coughed on the beer he had in his mouth making his eyes water. And then it happened.

  Her eyes shone, her mouth smiled and her whole demeanour relaxed when she laughed, she looked like she should have.

  Lucas cleared his throat trying to burn that image into his head.

  April returned to hardened steel.

  “Boyfriend?”

  “No”.

  “Did you just get tired of fucking him?”

  April was surprised. Yes. Yes in truth she had grown tired of fucking him.

  “Well, and me leaving”, April said that bit too defensively which had given it all away.

  “Right”, Lucas said, smirking slightly, “Where?”.

  April had to change the subject, “Los Angeles.”

  Lucas laughed. Not date laugh. Not forced. He actually laughed, “Cliché”.

  “Glad to know I can’t just say anything” April said with a smile.

  “No you cant”.

  Good, April was thinking. He had fight. People with fight were always a better lay. Like they were ridding themselves of some inner frustration, something only the person below them at that very moment would ever see.

  “I want to tell you something,” Lucas said suddenly.

  “Ok?”

  “Its weird but I want to know what you think”.

  “Ok”

  “Its about someone I used to know”.

  “Ex?”

  “No, a friend of mine”.

  For reasons Lucas could not understand he began to speak. Before he did he took a very long pull on his beer almost draining it. He leaned forward, undid his tie and rested on his elbows, crossing his fingers.

  “A friend of mine met this girl. Since I just met you, thought I would tell you something”.

  “Sounds generic”.

  “Well that’s the thing. It isn’t. Friend of mine, lets call him Max. He met this girl, well he had known her for a while, almost a year and a half. They kind of worked together, in the same building at least”.

  “Company ink?” April elbowed in.

  “No, again not quite!”

  April nodded.

  “She had a boyfriend, he had a girlfriend. There was something though. It seemed they liked each other’s proximity. Now both knew ‘the game’, they were well versed, practised and had been broken. However, it took them back to heady days of teenage lust when beer didn’t taste right. Nothing changed for some months, until they broke up with their respective other halves. Flirting increased and with our world today so did emails, facebook and texts. Still though there was no change.”

  Lucas paused and ordered another beer from the bar without saying anything, he merely raised his empty glass.

  “Parties came and went as did the year, it was soon winter. Still nothing. It was clear not only for them that something should happen, but also to everyone else. They had each told each other’s friends, they were urging them on. Not that they needed it.“

  The beer arrived and immediately Lucas drained half. April was considering whether this was a story about him.

  “Eventually after this charade had continued for almost eighteen full months they met up over a weekend. Drinks to start and one thing led to another.”

  Lucas paused like the grand orator and looked at April.

  “What! I want details. It can’t just be ‘one thing led to another’,” April said excitedly.

  Lucas smirked, “Yes it can, because that’s not the crux. They were and should have been the perfect couple, blazing a trail. The who is simple, it was Max and Sara. The where was London but that was soon to change, he was leaving and she represented the only thing left that could make him stay. The what is even easier, they had both wanted this for as long as they had first set eyes on each other. Games aside caution was torpedoed.

  The when was last year, last Christmas to be perfectly honest, similar to where we are now. The why is obvious, they wanted it. We all do, we all want to be loved and to find mutual attraction is hard enough, let alone when the two pieces in question have been friends and circling each other for almost two years. But fucking and kissing aside they wanted more. He however was leaving. He wanted to show her how much he cared and how he needed her by his side. Which leaves us only with the how; and therein, as the Bard would tell us, lies the rub.”

  April said nothing. Her sapphire eyes tried not to look into his but it was impossible. Even if he had used this on girls before, thousands, she couldn’t care. It worked. She wanted more, so much more.

  Lucas turned and shouted across the din, “Two Talisker”.

  April sat in silence, this man was dangerously close to her equal. He was all consuming when he spoke.

  The whisky arrived and Lucas took a long inhale of the peaty tones.

  “The how then”, he began.

  April felt herself blush for some reason.

  “They carried on as the couple they were meant to have been for the rest of November and into December. One night after some liquor Max finally confessed, he was leaving. Her knee-jerk was a nonchalant ‘so what’. Until she was lying alone the next night and realised what was going from her life.”

  “Fuck”, was all April could muster.

  “He knew she wasn’t happy with what she was doing. She had promise but courage to change was somewhat amiss. And so he made a plan like the times of old, a good old grand gesture.”

  April nodded, the Talisker smelling already like Lucas, it seemed his scent.

  “They had their goodbye in early January. All the while she was waiting for him to say ‘No, I can’t go, I wont’. He never did. All the while he bit his lip, bided his time. On the plane over he cried for the first time in years, he was playing high odds against the house. Perhaps too high but he always took the gamble.

  The first week he was gone he would sit up in his apartment in New York desperate to call. To hear her voice. To tell her the plan. On the other side Sara was heartbroken. She had heard nothing.”

  “Bastard”, April said under her breath.

  “That’s what she thought. All her friends had been wrong, this man was a house of cards who had come crumbling down in the faintest of breezes. Though his plan was now ready, it was time.”

  Lucas finished his Talisker. “Max called Sara’s brother, a man he had only met twice. He told the brother of the plan, the brother approved. It was beginning to take shape. Then it was time”.

  More whisky arrived. April didn’t even see Lucas order it.

  “Sara’s brother met up with her for coffee, three weeks had gone by and she said nothing. Behind the make up and the usual glamour she had been crying. ‘Look, we need to go away’ her brother said in Tom’s in Notting Hill. Sara shook her head like a stubborn mule. ‘You don’t have a choice, I have bought the tickets. Dista
nce from London will do you good’. The conversation went on and eventually she agreed. They were to leave the next day.

  They arrived at the airport and Sara’s brother could barely control the truth. Three thousand miles away neither could Max, he knew the timings and one text from the brother had confirmed it, the plan was well and truly in motion.

  Sara walked towards the gate and noticed her brother was a few paces behind.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked. Her brother reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out an envelope. He handed Sara a ticket to New York and a letter that she couldn’t open until she was on the plane.

  Now I don’t know who was in the airport that day, I never will, but I wished it had been me. The smile on her face so grand would only be seen once.

  Sara said goodbye to her brother and got on the plane and arrived in New York and there they both still live.”

  April ran a hand across her brow then rested her hand on her chin. She had no words. Hard as she was she had fallen totally for this story, possibly even the orator.

  “What did the letter say?”

  Lucas grinned, ‘Now you are coming, remember, only this, ‘the brightest fires burn the fastest’.’

  Chapter 4

  ‘Two for one’, ‘Three for two’, ‘Buy one get one free’

  All manner of brightly coloured tightly packed foodstuffs hailed their calorific naughtiness.

  These were the typical irrelevant and unvoiced rants that circled around David’s head as he travelled the aisles. Anything to distract himself from a gnawing hunger in the pit of his stomach.

  Temptation to look was too great though, every day now he went through the same routine, in the same shop, down the same aisles.

  “Oh my”, David said aloud as he picked up a packet of iced finger buns.

  David held them close. Deftly he turned the packet over ignoring the calorie wheel on the front that was all red. Red had always meant danger, and this was the worst possible kind, saturated.

  Up and up the brightly coloured wrapping containing the buns came towards David’s face. He pressed the cellophane against his nose and inhaled deeply.

  “Jesus…Christ”, David whispered as the smell of the sweet treats filled him. He held aloft the buns towards the halogen lights remembering how good they tasted and just desperate to engulf them one by one in great python swallows. It had now been three weeks since bun, biscuit, muffin, cake, crumpet, doughnut or scone. Pe-ter his personal trainer had been very clear about ‘cool’ foods and ‘un-cool’ foods.

  “This stuff man, this stuff is bad.” Pe-ter had said.

  “Really?” David had been so ignorant then.

  “Yeah man, bread based treats are the Trojan horse of foods. All nice looking but deadly, just deadly. They get inside you and let their silent soldiers free, burning your body to the ground. Even one and its game over pal.”

  David was about to put the packet back but he wanted one last encounter with its powder snow sweetness. Up the package went again in the same ritual towards the heavens.

  “Do you know how much I want you?” he said staccato to the packet such was his fervour.

  “Mummy?”

  David did not register at first.

  “Mummy?”

  The high voice of a child made David spin to his left, the bun chalice all but forgotten. As David turned pain racked his body, caused by any one of the six hundred sit-ups done that morning.

  The little boy, no older than five, looked like Paddington Bear with his blue toggled coat done up to his throat. His head was cocked to one side and the large peepers took in the form of David still clutching the buns as if he were about to sacrifice them.

  “Oh, hello” David said, stuffing the buns back onto the shelf of naughty.

  The blonde haired boy looked inquisitively at David. If he could speak and had the vocabulary of an adult he would no doubt say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  In this case, the boy didn’t have to, the eyes said it all.

  David was about to formally introduce himself, stumped with what else to do not knowing any children. Then he heard the shout.

  “Timmmy!!”

  The front of the pushchair careered around the corner. The even smaller child inside the brat transporter and covered by a Winnie the Pooh hood was screaming blue murder, his little red face looking resembling a cherry tomato ready to burst.

  “Timmy”. Again the screech echoed through the massive supermarket. Everybody within proximity turned.

  “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god” the mother squeaked as she reconnected with her missing cub.

  David looked at this incredibly attractive but typically annoying woman swoon over the long lost Timmy. She had the face of someone that was a bitch. Pointed, angular and used to getting what she wanted. The air of arrogance and chunks of rock sized jewellery said enough.

  She pawed at Timmy’s face and patted him down.

  The mother with her eyes ablaze began to shake. She rattled out “What did you do to him?”

  David turned to look behind him before realising this woman was talking to him.

  “Me?” David stammered pointing at his own chest.

  “Yes bloody you” the mother added pointing her ring decorated finger at him.

  “I….I” David stuttered.

  “Did you call him over? Did you want a closer look?”

  “No”, David shouted, “Of course not!”

  The woman’s eyes narrowed as she took in the form of David in front of her, “You pervert”.

  David couldn’t stop his mouth from falling open. “He walked up to me and said hello”.

  “No he didn’t! He’s better trained than that”.

  The mother pressed her forehead against little Timmy’s, “Did this man call you over? Did he….ask you to do things”.

  David was sweating all over, what the fuck was going on? All because of those stupid bloody buns. The little iced buggers weren’t just capable of making him fat but capable of enticing some shit-crazy mother to call him a paedophile for saying hello to her precious child.

  The mother grasped Timmy’s shoulders, “Did he?”

  David looked at Timmy and realised his fate lay in the hands of someone not old enough to even wipe his own arse, these were dark times indeed. Added to the tension a large crowd had now formed at the end of each of the aisles, awoken from their mundane shopping by the screaming banshee.

  David looked up the halogen lit aisles, the net was closing in on him. David could only thank that the word ‘paedo’ hadn’t been shouted. If the case, it would have been pitchforks and dunking in the village pond.

  Timmy was still deciding David’s fate. He looked at his mother then back to David again, his head cocked to one side.

  “Did he?” She wouldn’t let it drop, it was almost as if she wanted it to have happened so she could hammer David and tell her friends about the adventure over the foam of a skinny de-caffeinated soy mocha.

  “No”, Timmy squeaked.

  The mother embraced the little sausage, “Thank God, thank God”, she repeated over and over.

  Within seconds Timmy was tucked next to the tomato faced child and wheeled off. The mother did not so much as look back.

  Put simply David was left in pieces after such an ordeal. After the dizzying, almost erotic bun incident he was smashed back down to the cold earth by a serious allegation, perhaps the most serious of all. Murder was one thing, paedophilia quite another. All he had done was say ‘hello’. David did manage a moment of mirth realising that with a mother like that, no wonder Timmy had run away, he was making a break for it.

  David pushed his trolley away from the buns, he had lost his appetite. In the car park he saw the mother screech towards him in a non-descript massive black four wheel drive vehicle. As she passed she calmly looked him in the eye and flicked him a v-sign.

  *

  It was a long time since Sarah had gone to a bar by herself. In all truth sh
e didn’t really know why she had gone. It wasn’t like her to be so spontaneous. Single people sitting alone in pubs and bars were either drunks or doggers, particularly in London.

  Sarah knew what it was like to be alone though, she didn’t find it as uncomfortable as others did. With her work, some of the events she ran meant she had to travel the country. Being alone was like learning to like avocado, you just got used to it. Across the country she would go with her single serving suitcase eating single serving meals in another faceless hotel.

  Bored staff and itchy sheets topped off with a grease infused ‘gut-buster’ breakfast amongst the truckers and the techies. Before Dicky, during those trips, she would lay awake dreaming that he would sweep her away from all that.

  Since her promotion and his constantly erect penis, those sleepless nights in Travelodge’s could not have been further away. They did anything they wanted to each other, whenever they wanted. They were getting stronger and stronger. There was though, a loose end, there always was and she was here to try and tie it off. Besides, things always ended badly otherwise they wouldn’t end.

  So she dropped her cigarette and walked into The Surprise behind Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea.

  Stepping into the tidal wave of warmth and noise she felt her loose fitting Crew shirt chaff against the scratches on her shoulder left by Dicky the night before.

  “Two pints”, one man shouted from over her shoulder. She had picked wisely, the busiest places were the best to be avoided in. Hiding in plain sight was the best way to disappear.

  Thick wooden tables and armchairs adorned the room, all washed in creams and limes. According to the chalkboard gumph above the bar the Surprise had been in-situ for hundreds of years, Sarah doubted if it had seen better days.

  The crowd was older than most in South-West London, fewer men to eye her up at least. Old people wouldn’t trouble her, they were the masters of drinking alone. Either they had grown comfortable to sip solitary or were wallowing in regret.

  “A white wine”, Sarah said through a gap between two Barber jackets at the bar.