the lone surfer…unfinished…part three

17 Jul 2009 Leave a Comment

by nooshk in stories, Uncategorized Tags: narrative, writing

When I wake, it is mid afternoon and the heat seems to be subsiding. For now at least there is a breeze and the sun has lost its midday intensity. I take a shower and make some coffee, taking it out on the veranda. From here I have a pretty good view of the whole street, if you can call it a street that is, there are only six houses and only four that are lived in. There is this one, number four, where I am, at the top, on the curve of the road before it bends back round itself. Numbers one and three are empty, I figure they are just summer lets and that any day now a large group of holiday makers are going to descend on our small strip of paradise. At number 5 there is Monty, I have only met him once but he waves from his kitchen if he sees me, he must be eighty years old I think, all wrinkled and weather beaten. There are a couple of girls living at number two, I think they are students, I haven’t spoken to them yet, they go out pretty early in the mornings and keep themselves to themselves, I could smell a barbecue last night and think it was them. I haven’t figured out who lives at number six yet, there seem to be a few people, but I don’t think it’s a family, they don’t appear to know each other all that well, not that families always know each other well but they are there at different times and all seem similar ages, a summer house share I think. They are not very friendly and I haven’t spoken to them or them to me. One of them, a young man, is often sat out late on the wrap a around porch like me, he normally has a bottle of bear and a guitar, his haunting melodies fill the emptiness that I experience at night, and then the dark does not seem to surround me with such oppressiveness. I don’t like the sound of his beer bottle hitting the trashcan or the sound of his door closing, for then I know my demons will return and fill my head with their white noise. I see him now arrive home, his old navy blue car swings onto the drive with a low grumble. I can hear his car radio and then abruptly it shuts down, the dj in mid sentence. He opens the car door and stretches his legs out, they look long. He stays like that for a few minutes and I wonder what he is doing, then I notice a stream of cigarette smoke rising from the car. I can’t see his facial expressions at all, just his legs and the smoke. After a few minutes he throws the still burning cigarette butt out of the door and gets out of the vehicle. He stands, stretches and breathes deeply. For a brief second he caught my eye and I thought I saw a glimmer of a smile play around the edge of his mouth. I watched his retreating figure as he turned, and walked away from me and towards the house. He was wearing faded jeans, a vest with a shirt and dirty sneakers. His hair was orange, bright orange and stood on end in a quirky, spiky style. I hadn’t taken time to notice if he had freckles, but I imagine with that hair he did. I wondered what it would be like to join up his dots.

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