Telling Tales. Charlotte Stein

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СКАЧАТЬ print your articles in Non-Existent Monthly.’

      Gah, him and his stupid fake magazines. I make them up myself, but it’s only because of him.

      ‘No, it’s not fake. It’s just…not what I always wanted to write.’

      He raises his glass to me.

      ‘Hey, it’s still more than any of us managed, kid.’

      I kind of hate him, for saying that. But then Kitty stretches out on the couch beside me, and curls an arm around my scrunched-up legs, and puts her head in my lap. She’s already half-cut, I know she is, but I also know why she then says: ‘We could all still manage, if we wanted to. People don’t ever run out of stories.’

      I expect Wade to interject then – with something about rejection, probably, or losing the will to or any of the things I’ve felt myself a thousand times – but it’s Cameron who gets there first. I’d almost forgotten he was there even though he’s just to my right, in Professor Warren’s old wingback. Sitting at the head of the room like a tombstone, still and quiet and far more comfortable than he’d looked two hours ago.

      I guess maybe he’s a little cut too.

      ‘Apart from me. I think I ran out before I ever even began.’

      And then everyone laughs, of course they do. Funny, that I don’t really feel like it.

      ‘I always loved your spaceship story,’ I tell him, because that’s the truth. I did. It’s not a pity party I’m throwing here.

      But he looks at me as though maybe I am.

      ‘Ohhhh no you didn’t. I stopped writing years ago anyway,’ he says, and then he runs on before I can push at him again. ‘But I did always want to hear the end of “Hamin-Ra”. Did you ever finish that one, Allie?’

      I think I go a little cold then. Not because I couldn’t remember ever reading it out to them – after a moment, I vaguely recall reading the tame, vanilla beginnings of it – but because it’s so fresh in my mind. I think about the answering machine and the lurid list of bizarre scenarios, prancing through my head. I think about the window in the boat room, just waiting to open and let me through to another world of joy and pleasure and beauty.

      Not like this world of leather and drinking and designer stubble.

      ‘Yeah,’ Kitty mumbles from my lap. ‘I want to know if the Queen ever found her heart.’

      And now I feel slightly less disconcerted. It’s better when it’s not just Cameron remembering this one weird story I wrote, as though it had some special meaning or even worse…as though he somehow heard me through a fucking answering machine.

      But it’s still odd. I can’t even recall writing that part of it, about the heart or whatever it is Kitty’s blathering over. The whole and original thing is in one of my bags, but I’d stuffed it in there without looking, while the majority of me pretended I wasn’t doing it at all. After all, it isn’t as though this month is really going to be about ancient writing we did three hundred years ago. We aren’t really going to share stories just like before, and God knows I’m not going to share ‘Hamin-Ra’ even if we decide to do just that.

      I only brought it because…I brought it because I brought other stories too. I brought it because I grabbed a bunch and shoved it all in, and there’s nothing more to it, really. Just as there was nothing more to Cameron shoving rolls of stories into the back of his trousers as though yeah, none of us were ever going to find them. None of us were ever going to say come on, come on, where’s your tale, Cam?

      ‘Probably,’ I say, but Wade laughs, then, and says, ‘Oh, she knows. She knows for sure, she’s got it with her!’

      And I hate him for that too. Now they’re after me to read it and no, no, no, I can’t, I can’t, and then I have to tell them why and it’s mortifying somehow. It’s like pulling a tooth. Out of my vagina.

      ‘The ending’s smutty, OK? No no no.’

      It’s more than smutty – it’s downright pornographic. But I don’t say that and I’m glad, because even something as tame as the actual word I used has made Wade touch his tongue up to one pointed incisor, and I can see Cameron sitting up even straighter, on the periphery of my vision.

      Plus Kitty starts giggling like an idiot into my lap, spilling wine from the glass she should no longer be holding, while she’s sprawled all over me.

      ‘Great. Great, guys. Laugh it up.’

      But Kitty goes one better than that.

      ‘I always knew you wanted to write porn,’ she says, in-between hilarious, hilarious laughter. ‘All those stories about ghosts that wanted to have sex with people but couldn’t.’

      Oh, Lord.

      ‘I didn’t really want to write about porn, OK?’ I say, but then Wade has a go too.

      ‘I think you kind of did.’

      And then even worse: ‘I do remember a lot of sex-ghosts.’ Everyone turns to look at Cameron immediately. Mainly because he just used the words sex-ghosts as a term, and he didn’t even have to spend a lot of time searching for it. He just blurts it out and then, when we all stare at him in amazement, he takes a massive swallow from his wine glass.

      Definitely half-cut.

      ‘See. Even Harvard over there thinks so,’ Wade says, and of course Cameron rolls his eyes in reply. Sometimes Wade would call him Yale or Dartmouth, but the result was usually the same.

      ‘We went to the same university!’

      ‘Yeah. Yalevard.’

      ‘There’s no such place.’

      ‘Harvale, then.’

      ‘That’s even less existent than the other one you mentioned.’

      Ah, it’s like no time has passed at all. They can go like this for hours, every word hinging on Wade’s ability to be intentionally ridiculous for long periods of time, and Cameron’s almost death-like insistence on the literalness of things.

      Though he has grown a slight hint of sardonicism, right at the back of his words. It’s very faint but I can hear it, and there’s something about the gaze he lays on Wade that seems…cold, almost.

      It makes all the hairs on the back of my neck prickle, at the very least.

      ‘But anyway. Back to the sex-ghosts,’ Wade says abruptly, as though maybe he spotted the glittering cool beneath Cameron’s steady stare too.

      Sadly, this only puts me in the spotlight again. I feel like a Vegas stripper, only without the feathers. Or spangly nipple-covers. Or skin.

      ‘I really have absolutely no idea what you guys are talking about.’

      ‘Your stories were always like that, Allie,’ Kitty says, because she’s a goddamned traitor. ‘But it’s OK, ’cause mine were too.’

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