Thin Air

Storm Constantine

Stafford England

Thin Air

© Storm Constantine 1999,
2010

Smashwords edition 2011

This is a work of fiction. All
the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious,
and any resemblance to real people, or events, is purely
coincidental.

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All rights reserved, including
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The right of Storm Constantine to be identified as the author of
this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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Cover Artist: Ruby

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8 Rowley Grove, Stafford ST17
9BJ, UK

On the day he disappeared, the
sky was silver. He stood beside the sea, looking down at the beach
from a car park, gripping a black metal hand-rail, gazing out at
infinity.

It had begun already.

People walked across the damp
tarmac behind him, wreathed in an almost invisible steam. They paid
him no attention. Children shrieked and sea-gulls scattered. The
sands were pearl below. He felt so insubstantial. Perhaps it would
not be necessary to carry out the plans. Perhaps, if he
concentrated hard enough, he could be absorbed by the silvery
ether.

Summer time. He thought of
childhood, of those snap-shot days in sunlight. He did not mourn
them, but examined the memories with a distant nostalgia. The film
of his life. Where had it changed? When?

For a moment, he turned round
and looked up at the hills behind him, where sea-side residences
perched pink and white among the sycamores. This town held so many
memories, but none of them were his. There was something odd about
resorts, he realised. They were ephemeral. They had a virtual life.
Full of ghosts. Like he was.

Back to the sea. It heaved in
the distance, listlessly; a goddess in repose. Now that he had made
the decision, it was difficult to proceed. He might be wrong.

The sky was clear of rain now.
All tears were shed. He was surrounded by the smell of the tarmac,
by the rank aroma of the beach, mixed with a synthetic vanilla reek
from a nearby dough-nut stand. It was unremittingly ordinary, the
most concrete of illusions.

Would his disappearance be as
simple as making a decision? He had believed it so, sitting alone
in a hotel room, able to see through the illusion. Reality does not
exist. You can step out of it. So easy. Two hundred and fifty
thousand people disappeared every year. Where did they go? How
could such a vast number be so invisible? How many of them felt as
he did now?

He imagined it would be like
pushing through a membrane, slight resistance at first. He looked
down at the beach, at the buzzing masses of energy: human beings,
beach towels, sand.
I do not believe in it
, he thought.
Not any longer
. And the sky continued to burn above him. A
hundred tiny hands reached from the top of his head towards it. He
felt weightless.

The sea, the gulls, the sand. It
was all empty. Elemental. He fell.

If he
was dead, she was sure he’d make his presence felt to her somehow.
She wasn’t a great believer in the paranormal, but surely, if he
was no longer part of the world, there’d be some subtle indication
in her heart? She didn’t feel it, but perhaps that was because she
didn’t want to believe he was dead. If she imagined it hard enough,
would he come walking in through the door like nothing had
happened?

The flat was quiet in the
afternoon, almost too quiet, but its stillness didn’t seem
watchful, just empty. Dex wasn’t there. In a sense, he’d never been
there.

The phone lay in two pieces on
the floor, its wire and cord trailing like entrails. She’d savaged
it the night before, unable even to bear the click of the answering
machine as it fielded all the calls.

Jay padded barefoot out into the
kitchen where the refrigerator hummed reassuringly. The sun didn’t
reach here in the afternoon; all was in shadow, but warm. Inside
the fridge were three bottles of rum, one white, one spiced, one
dark. Today, it was white rum, for clarity. Jay took down a clean
glass from the cupboard overhead, filled it with ice from the
freezer. Then she poured the white fire over it, cracking the ice,
releasing its potency. Sometimes, Jay would put flower petals in
the glass, or leaves from her house-plants, or threads of her own
hair. All of these rituals were meaningless, because she had lost
the focus of her life, and no omens existed to herald its return.
Everything had changed. Forever.

As she sat drinking, with the
curtains drawn across the windows, filtering the light to the
colour of cinnamon, Jay realised that in her shock and sorrow, she
was somehow cleansed. All that existed was a raw form of herself,
perhaps without identity, but primal.

For five days, she had shut out
the world, because it was trying so desperately to get in. Even
with the curtains pulled close together like stubborn lips, she
still crawled across the floor when she had to pass the windows.
Not even her shadow would fall upon the world outside. Perhaps they
had all gone; the fans, the reporters, the photographers, and those
other people, who were drawn to sites of human drama like
carrion-eaters. Jay hadn’t checked since early yesterday morning.
She had been acquiescent at first, warmed by the attention. It felt
like everyone shared her bewilderment. Images of herself,
pale-faced and disguised by sun-glasses, were strewn about the
room; on the newspapers she’d trampled over, rolled in, wept onto.
Her skin was dappled with smeared print. Now, she felt like a
spectacle, something to be gloated over. Who cared, really?

There was no way forward from
here. This was the end, and it was endless.

Jay had met Dex at a party for
someone’s new CD release, a band who were on Sakrilege, the same
label as he was. She was covering the event for her column in
‘This’ magazine, accompanied by a friend, another writer named
Grant Fenton. Both Jay and Fenton were regarded with awe and fear
by the bands whose fate they could decide in print. Jay never
pulled her punches: most of what she heard and saw in the music
business irritated her. But, despite this, it had become her
natural habitat. Dex’s presence had inevitably touched Jay’s world
already on a number of occasions, but with little impact. She saw
him as nothing more than a product, embarrassing in his bravado. He
was also very famous, and would undoubtedly treat her with little
respect, so she’d avoided any confrontation. Jay was careful to mix
only with people who appreciated who and what she was. But that one
night in the summer of 1988, coincidences had aligned, bodies had
been strategically placed upon the board of the social gathering
and by ten to midnight, Jay and Dex were enclosed in the same group
of people, who were all gabbling rubbish inspired by too much
champagne. At just the right moment, when Jay in her private world
had been wondering what she was doing there, Dex had caught her eye
and a knowing smile had been exchanged. Somewhere, a light turned
on. Jay saw a kindred spirit in this unlikely figure before her.
For a fleeting second, she knew they had both been aware of the
travesty of the party, the superficiality of its participants, the
silly, delusional egotism of the whole scene. It was not love at
first sight by any means, simply a feeling of relief. They went
outside together.

The balcony hung high above the
river and the lights of London vibrated through the warm air.

Jay put down her champagne glass
on the balcony rail, and brushed her fingers through her hair.
‘God, those people are just awful.’

‘Twats,’ Dex agreed
succinctly.

‘I don’t know why I come.’

‘Free booze.’

‘It’s not worth it.’

‘No.’

She inspected him for a moment,
eye to eye, without the media screen. He was shabby, rather goofy
in appearance, but with interesting eyes. She suspected his hair
could do with a wash, because she could smell it, but the smell
wasn’t unattractive. His hands were sensitive, with oddly-aligned
thumbs. This was the man whose image was enshrined upon the pages
of every teen magazine in the country. Thousands of little girls
wanted to touch him, and here she was, on a balcony above the
Thames, close enough to smell his hair. The thought made her smile,
and he just smiled back, didn’t ask why. She liked that.

‘So what are you here for,
then?’ he asked her. ‘You work for Sakrilege?’

Ten minutes before, Jay would
have been offended that he didn’t know who she was, but now the
feeling was liberating. She shrugged. ‘No. I’m supposed to write up
the edifying experience for a magazine. People want to read bitchy
things about their friends.’

‘You’re a writer.’

‘I write, yes.’ She pulled a
face. ‘Pays the bills.’ She waited for him to ask if she’d ever
written about him, already formulating a suitable reply.

‘Words are the most powerful
thing in the world,’ Dex said. ‘People who work with them are
warriors.’

She glanced at him sidelong,
resisting the urge to laugh at these earnest words. ‘In that case,
I have a veritable arsenal about tonight.’ She paused. ‘I’m Jay.
Jay Samuels.’

His smiled widened with private
amusement. He’d heard of her all right, and from the look on his
face had read what she’d written about him. ‘I’ve seen your
weaponry draw blood on occasion.’

‘Nothing too fatal, I hope.’

He shook his head. ‘No, it’s
funny. Makes me laugh. That’s why you do it, isn’t it - to make
people laugh at other people’s expense?’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘Are we
arguing about this?’

He shrugged, stuck out his lower
lip. ‘Don’t think so. Are we?’

No, they weren’t arguing.

‘So, come on, then, tell me
about yourself,’ he said. ‘Where are you coming from, Ms
Samuels?’

She told him. Dex did not listen
with the ingratiating air she had become used to from musicians,
those who were afraid she would destroy them with words. Dex did
not care about such things. He just wanted to know her.

She described how she’d hung
around the music scene since she’d been a precocious fourteen
year-old in the late seventies. ‘They were the times though,
weren’t they,’ she said, then frowned a little, ‘or are you too
young to have been around then?’

‘I wasn’t around your scene,’
Dex said, ‘I’m a foreigner.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Up north. Foreign. Cloth cap
and whippet. You know.’

She smiled. ‘Not everyone thinks
that civilisation ends at Watford.’

‘But you do - perhaps until now,
anyway. I know what you London people are like.’

‘I wasn’t born in London. I come
from Hampshire actually.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘I was
just a kid in your time, but not much younger than you. So how did
you get into it all? Bet you were in a band.’

‘No. I was never musical myself.
I got into it through my art.’

‘Not writing?’

‘No, that came later.’

As an eighteen year old, Jay had
gleaned enough skill from a brief art school experience to create
record covers that aptly reflected the time. Startling pinks and
scratched black mutated slowly into the abstract art of textures;
mottled backgrounds and carefully placed artefacts; a rose against
degraded rock; the skull of a bird upon a collage of grainy
hieroglyphs. She’d never spent that much time on her work, being
too fond of parties and bored by sleep. Jobs had been rushed, but
eerily competent. She’d taken her environment so much for granted,
unaware that things inevitably change, and so they did.