Nick & Jenny

Nick & Jenny

by

Toni Bryan

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

Toni Bryan on Smashwords

Nick & Jenny

Copyright © 2010 by Toni Bryan

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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Dedicated to

D….

Mariposa Monarca

Porque la vida llevas alegremente

Y sobre corrientes paseas deliciosamente

Porque la reina eres

desde México hasta Canadá

Cuando extiendes tus hermosas alas

Yo anhelo estar a tu lado

Y no esconderme más

A special word of thanks.

My deepest thanks to Stela Ivanova for her continuing belief in me, both as a writer and individual, and without whose encouragement to publish this book, would have seen its manuscript no doubt gathering dust on a shelf, and almost certainly forgotten.

Finally, to my dear friends, Dino, Mary, Stefan, & Steph, a big thank you for your patience, understanding and acceptance of my right to be an individual.

This story, sometimes filled with the disappointments and horrors of life, shows how the individual can overcome. Above all it is a story about love and the need to express our humanity. I hope you agree.

Please note this book contains the infrequent use of some swear words and a detailed description of rape.

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Nick & Jenny

ordinary people, ordinary relationships, ordinary lives.

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Chapter 1

Nick

Nick lived a life lacking in any real depth, or so it seemed. To the outside world it appeared devoid of much, and yet he suffered no real hardship. Life was, basically, simple, deliberately so, for his needs were few and relatively insignificant.

Some might say that Nick’s life was dull. Nick’s job offered him no further advancement, he had gone as far as he was going; it paid miserably paying only for the basics in life, and perhaps there was enough over for a few extras should he ever need them on occasion.

Much could be said the same about his home. It was nothing special; the most that could be said of it was that it was ordinary. But then all the houses around him were ordinary. They were built just after the Second World War. Surrounding him were row upon row of terraced houses. On his street twenty of them were stuck together down each side of the road; the only thing separating them was a dark, gloomy alley, every four houses, leading to the small back gardens. Not gardens really, just areas of broken concrete slabs, mostly broken due to thousands of feet walking across them, or a couple of generations of kids kicking a ball about.

Nobody went down the alley. It was forbidding in a way. Cold, even at the height of summer, moisture running down the walls, a smell also lingered, nobody knew why it had always been there, but it was probably due to the constant dampness. The strange thing that people said happened was that they used to hear voices when the wind got funnelled through the alley. Nobody really knew if this was true, maybe it was.

In the back garden was a wall. On the other side lay an abandoned graveyard, decaying and rotting away through a lack of any real care. Once proud headstones stood haphazardly, tilting as though they were about to keel over, but the graveyard protected on all sides by high walls never experienced anything but a gentle breeze, so the headstones just leaned over at some time and stayed there. Perhaps they were just bowing their heads in respect, maintaining whatever dignity was left to them; hanging on as though it was some form of duty they were supposed to carry on for time immemorial.

The graveyard had been largely abandoned after the war; abandoned because it had served its purpose. No bodies had been laid to rest in its earth for twenty years or so; bodies now went to the municipal cemetery, or were cremated and the ashes scattered around the Garden of Rest if relatives didn’t want the ashes. The names on the headstones were those of families or individuals who had lived in a bygone age; nobody knew any longer who they were and so didn’t care about those resting in some form of disorganised peace.

The local council owned the graveyard, but no elected official on the Burial Grounds committee was brave enough to sanction its use for some other more useful purpose. It had been a bone of contention from time to time, questions were asked about its future but councillors moved onto more important matters, such as where to plant the new trees they had been given, or where the best place was to erect a new waste bin. Such a failure to do anything about the graveyard was due to the local church goers, strident in their determination to ensure the graveyard remained as a piece of hallowed ground. So it was left to become a scrub filled wasteland, where its only useful purpose was that it had become a miniature nature reserve. The monotony of the place, occasionally broken by birdsong, or the undergrowth disturbed by rustling vegetation as a rat ran down its well-trodden path to who knows where, maybe it was on its way home to the crypt of the local gentry buried there.

Nick didn’t care all that much about the place; he had no interest in it. To him, whenever he gave it a fleeting thought on occasion, always thought it might make a decent playground for the local kids, as there weren’t many places they could go and kick their heels and have fun. But such thoughts disappeared as quickly as they came. As much as Nick might want kids to have somewhere to go and play, he didn’t want them in his backyard. Kids were noisy, and all he was interested in was the peace and quiet of solitude.

So nobody went down the alley if they could help it, everyone using their front door. The doorsteps were badly worn, a hollow in the centre where people had scraped the dirt off the bottom of their shoes before they went in. The doorsteps were no longer cleaned by women, on their knees, scrubbing them, haggard with overwork, losing their looks through hard domestic chores before the advent of electrical goods, which now did the hard work. They used to be proud of their doorsteps, but such pride in who kept the cleanest step had disappeared years ago. Such a lack of pride merely reflected the general lack of attention the area now attracted. But there should be no surprise about that, the street had become a haven to migratory students, staying for no longer than three years but who often disappeared sooner because the rent was spent on parties, booze, drugs, and generally having a good time; over indulgent parents called on to bail them out at the appropriate moment. So the street was just a temporary refuge for people who had no future there, who would be off when they’d finished their degree at the university ten minutes’ walk away.

As one of the last long-time residents in the street, Nick only stayed because the house was his; left to him by his dead mother, who had died a horribly painful death from cancer, which had invaded most parts of her body, she finally becoming hooked on the morphine derivative drugs the doctors gave her to try and ease the pain. She in turn had been left the house by her parents who had died of old age some time ago. That was an apt description, dead. The street was dead, apart from the occasional party that lasted until 3 or 4 in the morning. Then students used to pile onto the street, singing, swearing, making complete arses of themselves, stumbling about in a stupor the result of drinking too much or maybe it was due to an over indulgence of smoking pot, maybe it was due to both, nobody really cared one way or the other. When the hellish racket got too much and woke Nick from his deep sleep, he just covered his head with the pillow, trying as best as he could to drown out the din.

Nick gave up complaining about the parties’ years ago. He really didn’t care anymore. Besides he had been young once, popular even, and knew that it was just kids who had to let their hair down every now and then. So he gave up being Mr Killjoy, thinking it was better for him in the end; let them have some fun he eventually concluded.

Life for Nick was ok, apart from the odd party. Nick worked for the local council as an administrator; a grand title that hid its true meaning. He was just a glorified gofer, going for this or that, for somebody or other. Occasionally he’d get a welcomed break and work as the receptionist on the reception desk. But such times were rare, and even then he’d end up depressed having to deal with Joe Public, who would traipse in off the street to complain about all manner of things; he was heartily sick with the amount of times he had heard about dog turds littering the pavements. He sometimes wondered if people walked around the streets counting them for no other reason than that their lives were even more mundane than his was.

Like most of the others who worked there, Nick felt an air of futility about it all. Most of the time it was paper shuffling, moving paper from one office to another for no apparent reason that he could think of. He sometimes thought what he did had a purpose of sorts, but after carrying another ten brown envelopes to equally faceless individuals, who had forgotten what it meant to say a simple thank you, such a notion of purpose disappeared without much difficulty.

Nick often wondered what he was doing working in the public service. After all the public ended up with either no real service to speak of, or before members of the public got anything resembling a service, they had to fill out reams of paper masquerading as official forms. Forms that were utterly incomprehensible and to understand them you needed a PhD in philosophy. Even those who were able to plough through the incoherent language, and decipher the unintelligible codes, normally made some kind of error. Such errors were normally small ones, a tick in the wrong box, or a misspelt answer, but were enough to declare the form null and void, and the poor sods had to waste another three hours or so filling in another one.

Nick thought public service was a joke, thought up by some non-descript individual, closeted away in some hidden recess of local government, in a room bereft of any natural lighting, where the pallor of the individual was a shade of matt white, caused by the endless hours sat beneath fluorescent tubes whirring away, flickering to their heart’s content. Nick often wondered if this faceless individual had nothing better to do than wile away his time, coming up with forms that progressively become more designed to be filled in incorrectly. Nick’s only comforting thought was that it kept somebody gainfully employed, no matter how tedious the job or what it entailed; some call it keeping jobs for the boys Nick often mused over a cup of cold dispenser coffee, but then Nick sighed a sad breath for he knew that he was one of them.

No matter the grumbles Nick sometimes mumbled from time to time, at least he had a job. He was better off than the poor sods he met as a public servant. The sick, the old, the single parent, the unemployed, the disabled, the homeless and the battered. He had met them all, they all came in expecting some kind of help, but often went away none the wiser. The bloody forms were way beyond most of them, 99% of the time incorrectly filled out because they couldn’t understand the couched middle class terms that were used. They ended leaving the council offices, no nearer a decision about housing benefits, or a home, or some other form of benefit they were entitled to. Often was the case, because the individual concerned was poorly educated, that decisions went against them because they couldn’t express themselves, or didn’t know how to fill out the bloody forms, so they ended up with nothing. Even if they appealed, they normally had to fill out another bloody form, which was just as bad, so lost out again. Nick could never understand how those in the greatest need were always made to wait for weeks on end before a decision was made, whilst others who had no real need of the council’s services always managed to get a decision within a matter of days; perhaps its true Nick wondered, it’s who you know.

Still it was better to have a job, even a crappy one; at least it put food on the table. Not that Nick was poor, far from it, both his grandparents and mother had left him some money, not a great deal it was agreed, but enough to invest wisely and live off the interest. Of course Nick, a closet socialist took the honourable path and let the Coop Bank look after it, depositing it in some account that was ethically clean. Better to share his wealth amongst companies that didn’t use animals to make a profit, or some commercial enterprise that was only concerned with making as much profit as it could regardless of how they did it. In some things Nick held on to his principles, at work it was pointless because all that mattered was adhering to the red tape.

So Nick led a relatively comfortable life, even though his salary was a pittance by any standards, only just above the minimum wage of £5 per hour, so never gave him the opportunity to save anything. But he didn’t grumble, after all others were far worse off than he was, so there wasn’t much point in moaning. Besides if the truth be known he was happy there, if only because he felt secure in his job, he didn’t rock any boats, or stir up any trouble, just floated from day to day like a piece of flotsam that bobs around aimlessly on the surface of the ocean.

Home was where his heart was. Nick liked his home because he could escape into a world of his own choosing. Here he was himself, the artist, or the poet, or the writer, a creative side to him that nobody knew about, because he didn’t want them to know. In his art, he created paintings over which he had no control. He had his ideas, and when he started drawing on the canvas some unknown force took over, leading him to wherever the brush would eventually go. He never understood why his work turned out the way it did; strange surreal images that had hidden meanings, none that he could successfully explain to people, for what did they know. Even Nick didn’t really understand what eventually ended up on the canvas, it normally being far removed from what he had originally thought. Yet for every painting completed there was a real sense of satisfaction, that despite the oddities he managed to produce, he felt elated for a short period, after which he would distance himself from what he had done. He never really believed that he had any talent for what he did, and the odd picture that he gave away to his circle of very few friends always seemed to please them. Why anyone would like his work was beyond his ken, after all with his leaning towards blaringly colourful images, the basis of the executed image, the naivety of the finished form, and the amateurish brushstrokes they had no right to appeal; but appeal they did.

That was the thing about Nick, he had no real confidence in anything he did or tried. He never understood that he had a talent for painting, because he was too harsh a critic of his own work, and his only real defence was to become quickly detached from it. In many ways he would look at a finished painting, and not see what he had accomplished, but think that it was someone else’s work. Maybe that’s a sad thought, maybe not. Maybe it’s all part of the creative process and the need to constantly move on to the next thing. Maybe that’s it; it’s about moving on, not standing still, trying to create the perfect painting, trying to come up with the one perfect idea, instead of bits of an idea in everything he painted. Maybe one day it would all come together, but Nick never really believed that. Still it gave him some sort of pleasure, the happiest moments when he was expressing himself.

The other thing that Nick