OK, it's time to post part II of Jim & Carol's story. Thanks to Markus for reminding me tonight. And he's going to kill me because it was Thundercats I saw on a tee and not Samurai Pizza Cats... But I'll keep looking. And if it's any comfort, I found you a vintage 84 Optimus Prime shirt here:

http://www.t-shirt.com/t-shirts/Vintage-84-Optimus-Prime-T-Shirt.html

Previously, on Jim & Carol... nah, just read on.

1

Though the passions being played out within the tiny hotel room were animal, Jim felt a celestial sense of beauty. Like a religious fervour, his lust for Carol sang with goodness. On Carol’s queen size bed, they weren’t just having sex, satisfying carnal urges, they were sharing their pain. Two people who’d deduced life’s futility, tasted it’s lack of hope, were holding onto each other for want of something else, something more real. They didn’t have love, but they had a need for each other that was stronger than most marriages. With Carol, Jim was sharing his darkest hour. He thought that for the night at least, he had found redemption. As they writhed and moaned, Jim was holding Carol. Holding her like he’d held no one else he’d had sex with. Carol for her part went on kissing his eyes, whispering Give me your soul, give me your soul, whenever she had control of her senses. When she lost control she cried out, tears splashing at her cheeks, and Jim’s as she thrashed her head from side to side.

When the final anguish of orgasm came, it was simultaneous. Carol convulsed from head to toe, thrusting her head forward several times like a mentally retarded patient. Jim’s eyes clouded over and his face contorted in that ridiculous way that only male faces do during climax. Satiated, and exhausted, there were no words between them. Each had gained an intense understanding of the other’s pain. They lay silent and still under the white lace doona, basking in the moment. Their souls, only minutes before entwined, made the slow journey from oneness back to their rightful owners. Only when this journey was complete could Jim or Carol make a sound. Carol is the first to break the silence with,

“Well, I don’t know about love, but I certainly feel dizzy.”

“That’s not love, that’s booze.” is Jim’s typically cynical reply. He follows it up with, “There’s no love left in the world. The boomers took it and turned it into a cliche devoid of any real meaning. They gave it out for free and reduced it’s value to nothing. People don’t fall in love, they just become content with each other’s company.”

“Well, I’m content right now. I think that gives me the right to pretend.”

Jim is concerned with Carol’s train of thought. He knows that it would be conceited of him to think that Carol’s post-orgasmic glow was a show of love, but he too is feeling content. He could very easily find some consolation in sharing his life with Carol, but that wouldn’t solve his problems. Things were too far gone now to even consider redemption. He tries to find the words to tell Carol he has to leave, but before they arrive she says,

“I’m not about to confuse sex with love, or contentment or whatever, but right now, this second, I’m happy. I can almost believe that one day I’ll find what I’m looking for. I’m really greatful to you for that, wether you share my joy or not.”

“No, I agree, I’m happier than I’ve been in a long time. Still, I don’t want to mess up your life, so I guess I’d better leave.”

Carol rolls toward him and throws her arms around his neck.

“You’re not going anywhere,” she says, “Just let me pretend for a while longer.”

While Jim lays silent, trying to find excuses to get up and get out, he sees that Carol is asleep. Drawn in by the rythym of her breathing, he feels the pull of sleep himself. Before long he is caught, and he drifts into oblivion.

2

When Jim wakes, his watch tells him it is just after five-thirty in the morning. Beside him, Carol lays with her face turned away, her arms no longer holding on. The pattern of her breath tells him she is still asleep. Rising slowly from the bed so as not to wake her, he begins rounding up his clothes.

He could stay and lay at her side until she wakes, he is well aware. He knows that this is exactly what Carol wants him to do. But if he gets back into the bed, falls asleep again, and wakes along side her, he will be in trouble. He wil have a perfect moment on his hands, and perfect moments are dangerous things for people who’ve made up their minds to die. Perfect moments save - Jim doesn’t want to be saved.

Fully clothed now, he looks down at Carol’s sleeping form. She is curled in a foetal position with her face to the wall. She has pulled the doona around her on all sides so that it forms a perfect sculpture where she lies. It traces the curves of her body in much the same way as Jim is now doing with his eyes. Her body is in near to perfect proportion and Jim ponders once again the logistics of getting back into the bed. Dragged by the strength of his convictions alone he walks to the door. As he struggles with the stiff and unyielding lock, Carol stirs and turns towards him. In a tone of frightened desperation, her eyes not yet open, she calls his name.

“Jim?”

Unsure of wether she is actually awake or not, Jim says simply,

“Yeah?”
“Are you leaving?”

Jim’s eyes scan the motel room, like he is searching for words that are floating through the air. They come to rest once again on Carol and he says,

“Yeah.”

Eyes completely open now, and locked with Jim’s, Carol sighs and says,

“I thought you might.”

With this she turns her body back towards the wall and resumes the slow and steady breathing of sleep. Jim, with nothing left to say, finally opens the door and leaves. As the door closes Carol begins to weep. She pours out her tears like the scotch she serves for a living - freely and without any deep thought. She continues to cry until exhaustion drags her back to sleep.

In the primary coloured and softly lit world of her dreams there is a house. Somewhere in the suburbs, far away from Woodley, two children roll across a lush lawn in the back yard with a border collie pup. As Carol pours generous serves of fresh water over bright green ferns from a plastic jug, a car pulls into the brick-paved yard out front. The pup stops frolicking and its ears stand straight up. As the dog’s tail begins wagging ten-beats-to-the-second, Carol stops watering and says,

“Dad’s home.”

The children rise from the lawn and race each other to the white picket gate at the side of the house. As the gate opens, a smokey-grey cat runs into the back yard and pounces on a butterfly. After the cat, a tall and well-built man walks into the yard where he is set upon by two happy children and a barking dog. Tucked under one arm he is carrying a brightly coloured statuette. As Carol approaches him to kiss his cheek she notices what it is.

“Here you go sweetheart,” he says, handing her the statue,“I bought you a garden gnome.”

Quick First Time Video Post

Hello sicbunnies,

I had a brainwave idea today and it was received with too much meh by the technical people at my work. So to try and get them on board, I made a proof of concept tonight. I've posted it here.

The song belongs to the J.B.s and is called Pass the Peas. Buy it if you like it, it rocks. The video is a comp from iStock.

Jim & Carol

Hey there sicbunnies, I am sorry I have been neglecting you. It's been a frantic month or so of working during the day and working at night followed by worshipping at the church of Saturdays. With Dags linking to this blog today on Twitter, it made me think I should post something. So, for lack of anything better, I will post a two-parter from The Strip.

This is Jim & Carol's story. Jim is a main character who wants to end his life. Hoping to do it with a heroin overdose, he waits outside a pub for a dealer to show. When he doesn't show, Jim goes inside the pub after getting drenched and ends up drying up in the barmaid's room upstairs; waiting for her to return so they can drink. This was the first time, in any medium, that I had tried to write a love scene. I felt, at the time, that it turned out not too bad. It's passionate, but kind of sad - like the characters. This is just the lead up to the love scene. That will come next week or so. This one is long, so if you're going to read it, you're probably Dags. Hi Dags :)

Jim & Carol
1

When he is awoken by the pounding on the door, Jim has no idea how long he has been asleep. He squeezes the bridge of his nose with his fingers dug into the corners of his eyes. He yawns once and is awake. Rising from the bed he opens the door to Carol.

“Hey Jimbo. fall asleep did you? I’ve been knocking for a while.”

“Yeah, I must have drifted off. Sorry. I’m awake now though.”

“Good,” she says, “Because I really feel like a natter. Besides, I swiped what was left of the bourbon.”

Jim notices for the first time the half empty bottle of Rebel Yell that Carol is holding by the kneck in her left hand, and the glasses she has gripped in her right. Placing the bottle and the glasses on the coffee table, Carol tells Jim to take a seat, and walks to the bathroom. Jim sits on one of the chairs by the television and awaits her return. He hears the toilet flush and then the water in the sink being run. Carol comes out of the bathroom holding his still damp clothes.

“I’ll get this thing started up first.” she says as she turns some dials and presses some switches on the heater device in the corner of the room. When the heater has been lit, Carol lays Jim’s clothes out on the floor in front of it, neatly and individually. “There, that’ll do. They’ll be dry in no time. Meanwhile, I’m going to pour a drink, do you want one?”

Jim answers yes and Carol pours a shot into each glass - expertly like only a barmaid can. Handing Jim his drink Carol offers a toast,

“To old Sef.”

Jim tilts his glass towards hers and takes a drink. Carol has downed her entire shot. She sits on the bed and there is a long moment of silence before Jim says,

“His sorrow touches you somewhere doesn’t it Carol? I mean, you see a lot of sad and tragic drunks, but Sef’s grief seems to tear you apart. Why do you think that is?”

“Nobody has given me any guarantees that I’m not staring at my future when I talk to Sef. The rest of them, they’re just drunks. Most of them have never had anything but booze in their adult life. Sef had true love, you can tell that by the way he screams out for his wife. Sef drinks like he does and acts the way he does because he’s lost his reason for living.” She pauses here and sighs, looking as if the words to follow were hurting on their way out. “Jim...I don’t even have a reason to live. I could be just like Sef right now if I stopped fighting it.”

Because Jim did not know Carol very well, and because he himself had lost his faith, he saw no reason to tell her she did have a reason to live. Instead of giving her Paul’s favourite quote - “Have the courage to live, anyone can die” - he consoles her with,

“You’re not where Sef is though are you? You’re fighting it and fighting it well.”

She responds with,

“But I’m so very tired Jim...so very tired.”

The sincerity and poignancy of her arguement brings silence to the sweet-scented motel room as the newly started rain taps in agreeance on the roof. Under the rythym of the down-pour, Carol has her eyes closed and Jim is finishing his drink. When he is done he places the shot glass on the coffee table. His movements jar Carol from her silent contemplation and she speaks.

“Everything I was ever taught about life hinged on the fact that things would go according to plan. Us girls, they taught us to take care of a family; change babies, cook meals, that sort of stuff. They taught us all about mortgages, hire purchase, tax returns, writing resumes and letters to employers, taught us how to manage money. All these things assumed that our lives would be just the same as theirs.”

Pausing for a moment Carol still has her eyes closed. Jim has been watching her speak. Her mouth, short with curvacious and thin lips, is moist and shining. Each word that passed through it brought a wink to the light pink lipstick that made her look like she was kissing the air. A long, drawn out exhalation passes through her lips before she speaks again.

“But our lives are nothing like theirs Jim. The generation that came before us had guarantees about where they’d go. You went to school and then you got a job, a good job. Once you got a job you got married, and once you got married you had children. Everything was mapped out for them, and it was all there to be taken. They taught us how to live life in a world that was just like theirs. They taught us to be exactly like them.”

She pauses once more like she’s trying to find the words. When she lets out another sigh, Jim realises that the words are hurting her again.

“Nobody told us what to do if we ended up living in a pub all alone.”

“Is that what gets you down about life Carol, that you’re living in a pub? There are worse things than that. Bartending is a very noble and necessary profession. You should be proud of what you do, you do it very well.”

A smile arrives on Carol’s face for Jim’s compliment, but her mouth does not keep it for long. As it falls from her lips and the life seeps from her features, she says,

“It’s not the pub really, it’s the living alone. I mean I’m twenty-four for shit sake. At my age my parents were married, had two children, a mortgage and a paid off car. I’ve got a piece of shit Datsun that I paid seven hundred dollars for, and that’s about it. Where’s my brick-paved front yard? Where’s my garden gnome? My pets? My children? Where’s my shot at true love?”

Jim wants to share something with Carol that he had worked out a long while ago, but is hesitant. He had found in the past that sharing his uniquely twisted values with those more traditionally inclined could only cause static. He opts instead to give Carol a watered down version of what he knew as the truth. A version that will hide his complete and utter belief in it. A version that will leave the ending open so that she might still find hope.

He fails.

“You know what I think about love Carol? I think it’s like slowly sawing your own gangrenous foot off at the ankle.”

For the first time since she’d laid back on the bed Carol’s eyes are open. She is looking straight at Jim, trying to gauge his sincerity. When she has decided he is not joking, her expression becomes concerned and urgent as she waits for him to explain. He continues,

“You see, we all have this need to feel love, we have to have it - just like if your foot goes gangrenous you have to cut it off. The more we try to fill this need for love, the more it hurts. But love is a part of what it is to be human, so we don’t want to go without it. If we stop needing, we cease to be. So, to keep our need for love, we prolong the pain. We go and meet someone new. We get our hearts broken. We pick up and we start again. We grit our teeth, scream out loud and saw as slowly as we possibly can through that leg. We hold on for dear life to that pain just to keep our useless and disease ridden foot for a moment longer.”

Carol’s silence speaks volumes. It seems to Jim that she has seen his truth, grasped this fundamental fact of existence. Just when he thinks she is about to weep for all human-kind, and give herself up to his words, she slowly shakes her head, breaths deeply and says, almost in tears,

“Who broke your heart Jim?”

There are many things Jim could say at this moment. A million excuses he could offer for his fatal cynicism. He could offer up the town in which he lived that kept him bound, and drawn, to dichotimies of industry and nature that made him weep. He could hold out his job, what had happened to Tom Sanders. He could point to his total and painfully complete loss of hope, lack of future, but none of these would touch deep enough.

“I did. I broke my own heart. I spent four years learning to do something I didn’t want to do. When the time came to get out and do it, I went out and did it. Instead of holding on to what I knew was right, I sold out and went with the flow.”

He is fighting back tears here. He is wrestling with a pain more deathly sharp than he suspects Carol will understand. He has turned his head from her and she can only hear his voice breaking, quivering - she can not see the anguish in his features. Staving off a wave of pain so strong that it taunts him, dares him not to break down, Jim continues to pour truth out to Carol. Truth that had been tearing him apart for years.

“See, society says you have to work Carol. When society told me that, I listened. I clutched society’s word to my heart like a tattered book of prayers. I jumped right into the abyss believing that the darkness would disappear. But the darkness never went away Carol, society isn’t always right. Society doesn’t always take everything into account. Just like the baby boomer teachers we had, society never made plans for people like us. It never counted on having a generation of over-educated and listless individuals who were disatisfied with what they’d been taught to do. If you force someone to be where they don’t belong, the outcome can only be tragic.”

Carol is sitting on the edge of the bed with her head bowed. One hand, her left, is entwined in the fringe of her auburn hair and she is pulling like she has a migrain. Her elbow is rested on her knee. Her eyes are closed and Jim can hear her breath, irregular and broken. She is quietly sobbing.

“I didn’t mean to get you down Carol,” says Jim. “Look, I’ll just leave you alone okay?”

She lets go of her hair and suddenly sits up right.

“No. Don’t go Jim. It’s just that I’ve never seen so much pain. I had no idea. I thought you were totally together.”

“What gave you that idea?” asks Jim in a tone that is not so much curiosity as disbelief.

“I’ve seen you in the pub with your friends. I’ve listened to your conversations. Whenever one of them had something serious to say you’d cut the air with a smart remark and you’d all be laughing again. Why don’t you ever talk about your own problems?”

Jim ponders her question and wonders briefly if letting all the anguish out long ago might have led him to a better fate. The thought is only brief though and he tries to explain his silence to Carol.

“I’ve never felt I had the right. I’ve seen real pain Carol. Real pain is the men who work around me, work under me - work like dogs for minimal wage just to keep their families. I’ve watched them lose arms in huge steel machines that I built. I’ve watched them picket the factories while their families starved so they could stand up for what they believed in. I’ve seen money troubles tear their marriage apart, seen them lose their reasons to work. They turn to the bottle and we never see them again. What right have I got to whinge and complain? What’s so wrong with my life that I should bare my soul to my friends and scream out in pain? There are men where I work killing themselves a little more every day for the sake of those they love. I’ve got no one to care for but myself. I’ve got a good wage and I’ve got my health, and that’s a damn sight more than any of those guys will ever have.”

When Jim has spoken his mind, Carol is still crying. Filled with guilt for having caused her pain he wants to console her. Placing his arm around her shoulder he can think of nothing more to say than,

“I don’t have the right.”

Carol turns toward him, her tears slowing, and holds him tight. In a breathless tone filled with a sort of cosmic litost, she sobs,

“So much pain...so much pain.”

Her crying does not abate for almost five minutes. When it does, still wrapped in Jim’s arms she says,

“Do you ever get the feeling that it’s all coming to an end? The world I mean. Everything. It’s like things are way too fucked up for us to ever fix them. For most of my life I’ve had the feeling that we’re just here to run the time out. We’re not moving towards anything, I can feel that. I think we’re all simply running around in circles trying to convince ourselves that we’re not insignificant little specks in space. We’re not going anywhere.”

“No,” Jim says, “There’s nowhere to go.”

“If the world comes to an end in our life time, we’re not going to achieve anything anyway. And if it doesn’t, well we’re never going to know the ending, so what’s the point? Where do we even think we’re going?” Carol says, genuinely at a loss to guess the meaning of life.

Jim thinks in silence for a moment and then speaks the truth as he knows it, his own personal rule for life, garnered from Carol’s own words.

“We’re not going anywhere.”

To add dramatic weight to the moment Jim stands up from the bed. Walking over to where his clothes are, he sees that Carol has turned her head. He drops the bathrobe and dresses. Carol keeps her head turned away when she says,

“Jim, can you do me a favour? Will you stay the night?”

Jim walks to the bed and sits down beside her. He is taken aback by her request and she notices this.

“Don’t fel under any obligation, I’d just like the company. I don’t think I’ll sleep tonight, but you’re welcome to. I’ll just sit up and think about where it all went wrong.”

“Yeah, that’s fine, I’ll stay.” A smile that reeks of conspiracy creeps across his face as he thinks of his next words. Trying hard not to laugh at his own wit he says “It’s not like I’m going anywhere.”

Carol laughs at his remark and he sits down next to her. She emptys the bourbon bottle into their glasses and they both take a swig.

"You know." says Jim, "I don't think I'm going to sleep either."

With these words, the mood turns sultry. Carol looks deep into Jim’s eyes and rests her hand against his leg. Returning her gaze Jim wants to ask what she is thinking, but fears that the cliche will ruin the atmosphere. She saves him from making a decision by saying,

"They say that the eyes are windows to the soul, but I don't think that's true. It's your tears. That's where your soul hides." She twists her body slightly towards him and places her mouth against the corner of his eyes. Through intermittent kisses, she says, "Give me your soul. Just tonight... give me your soul."