Faith
Gabe is going to alternate between a linear plot and flashbacks to create a detailed character profile of the protagonist in Dolls. Except, a lot less boring than that just sounded.
This is one of those flashbacks, which I’m sticking up because this is a writer’s blog and I haven’t put writing up in a while.
Faith
“And he killed her, because of my fucking mistake.”
Luke doesn’t swear often. He must want me to think this is serious.
“Her body, her beautiful body torn up by Snake’s shotgun, was in the ground one day before I found him. And I…” He makes a fist and brings it slowly to his face, jaw tight and twitching. “I fought him, and I killed him. Broke his back across my knees. It was raining
How Hollywood.
“and there was hardly any blood spreading through the water.” His fist slams into the table, makes the three glasses bounce, and there’s an unashamed growl in his voice. “I wanted there to be blood.”
Around our square table and four chairs, the bar continues on untouched by this melodrama. Luke stares at the short tumbler of whiskey in the middle of the table. He looks pathetic, big soft lip handing and rolls of fat lying atop one another beneath a too-tight t-shirt.
“I’m a murderer,” he whispers, then closes his eyes and turns his head away with all the deliberation of a ham actor.
I pick up my pint and take a sip, glancing around to see who else is in the pub. A mini lumberjack with a warm face is stroking the hair of his partner as she tips her head into his chest, truly content. Five teens are playing some sort of card game in the corner, though it seems to mostly just be a platform for inane banter. The token alcoholic who’d be skinny aside from his gut is mumbling to the cigarette machine in the corner. It’s quiet, even for a Thursday. I can hear every word of The Cure’s Burn . It’s never quiet enough in a public place to announce yourself as a murderer, though. Only a complete dipshit would do that.
Luke looks at me again and nods to the whiskey. Tremendously important. “All because of this. Because I got drunk and stupid and pissed off the wrong guy. I should have gone down and let him win. But I was cocky. Drunk and stupid and selfish and cocky. I beat Snake, and my beautiful Sophia had to die because of it. That’s why I need to tempt myself sometimes. See if this time I’ll lose myself to it and never come back. I look at it and then I think of her, and she’s all that stops me. I can’t dishonor her memory.”
More than anything right now I want to pick up that shot and knock it back. Like a hardened city dweller wants to suck on exhauster pipes in the Scottish Highlands, I want to neck that whiskey in front of him.
It’s one fucking drink.
It’s going to take a lot more than that for you to notice, you fat bastard.
His hand reaches out and he wavers, fingers trembling before they finally clench around his glass of coke with a loud sigh. The skin of Luke’s hands is beautiful, smooth and unbroken. They’re very feminine: small and with fingers that taper off as thin as Laura’s. His wrists are slim and he doesn’t have much arm hair. This is all a sharp contrast to his face which is torn up by old acne scars and new spots brewing. He has a soft, almost flat nose and his hair is short and tufted, like expensive doll hair.
These are not the hands of a man who was involved in underground fighting rings for six years, taking on people with names like Five by Five, allegedly as broad as he was tall. These are not the wrists of a man who used to arm wrestle with a woman called Hook, whilst her brothers Line and Sinker watched on. She was the bait for anyone who pissed off the family, you see, and of course Sinker was enormous. This was not the face of a man who murdered an evil fighter called Snake and screamed his dead lover’s name into the rain in the night. A lover who was small and frightened, abused by her brothers and father so that she absolutely needed protecting. Needed a guardian to tragically fail her and then to get away with avenging her death by bringing about another.
This is all bullshit, of course.
There are no underground fighting clubs in this county where Luke has always lived, because I know enough people in the subcultures and nasty circles to have heard about them already if there were, or had ever been.
He could not have led this pulp fiction life with the mother he had.
A shotgun would leave far less than that.
After this long, dramatic silence which must have been infinitely satisfying to him, Luke growls softly and gives me a pained look. “Tell me what’s you’re thinking, please.”
Another mouthful of lager so I have time to compose my face. To laugh now would just ruin it. “I think that all sounds pretty fucking terrible.”
Luke nods and leans forwards, resting a smooth arm with a tight fist on the table as a barrier between himself and the whiskey. “No one has it easy. This is how hard life is. We’re all just puppets played by cruel and sadistic gods.” He looks at me with what I think is an amateur facsimile of compassion. “I heard about your parents. Laura told me that you found them. Their bodies.”
I know what blood smells like. The dogs’ smelt like my mother’s when I threw up on her. “Yeah, it’s a bitch.” It’s been eight months and it’s still raw and absolutely not a topic available to this man.
He makes a low sound and his eyes are soft and wet against my stare/ I can see him trying to wield the ten years he has over me, trying to look wise and that he’s bestowing his trust and words onto me.
I’ve got ‘If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit join our club!’ from the old Club bar adverts going around my head. Advert jingles seem to be my mind’s defense mechanism against thinking of my parent’s bodies.
“That was a terrible thing to happen for you,” Luke tells me solemnly. “I can’t even imagine your pain. I’m here if you ever need to talk about it. Always.”
My internal jingle clunks to a halt. I suddenly understand what he’s doing. He did this to Laura last year and I know of two other women he’s tried to manipulate in the same way.
He’s trying to make me need him. By delivering this excessively gut-wrenching story about his dead girl and his guilt, he’s fixing it so that I will feel obliged to tell him my saddest story. Then we’ll be bound to each other in misery and secrecy. Quite why he’s doing this to a guy is beyond me.
Laura didn’t have much of anything in terms of a sob story, but this man came out of a projection box when all the films were on and the cinema was quiet, and he’d milk out any teenage angst she would divulge and tell her how awful they were and how sorry he was for her. Suddenly, everything that wasn’t bothering her and she’d moved on from had her crying. I had wanted to meet the man who had turned her old paper cuts into wounds just so she would need him. See him as her savior from what felt like a life or misery and pain.
Even now we were broken up and out of touch, I was still interested so I’d kept in touch with Luke. Now I get it, and no wonder Laura had gotten scared of him in the end, but found it almost impossible to cut him out of her life because he kept hanging on. Kept thinking that she needed him, and that to let her go would be to fail her like he had Sophie.
Despite the soft hands and spot-scarred face, Luke was a dangerous man. What scares me is that he actually believes these stories he’s telling. Has absolute faith. I’ve never seen a delusion so complete before. He is a sociopath. A psychopath builds his castles in the sky. A sociopath lives in them.
We have sat in silent stillness for a few minutes now, and peripherally I have seen that he never stopped staring at me as I looked at the table. Forced intensity.
He reaches out a small hand to my shoulder with a pained grimace, as though he might cry, but I dodge the touch by leaning into the table and picking up the whiskey. I swallow it slowly, enjoying the wet burn, and set the tumbler back down.
He completely misunderstands the gesture.
Kayleigh J Moore is a 23 year old author living in the Cotswolds in the United Kingdom.