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    Black Dress
    Black Dress
    Black Dress
    Ebook136 pages2 hours

    Black Dress

    By Clifford Thurlow

    ()

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    About this ebook

    With black dress – the saga of a girl whose fantasies lead to her being stalked by a killer (london arts council prize-winning story) and greek fire – a bored teacher tempted to sell his wife to a Greek goatherd (first published in the third alternative), comes this exciting collection of seven urban myths and nightmares by best-selling author clifford thurlow, a writer whose work “radiates not just personality, but that illusive, lyrical honesty the existentialists used to call authenticity” - daily telegraph.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherYellowBay
    Release dateJul 26, 2011
    ISBN9781908530042
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      Book preview

      Black Dress - Clifford Thurlow

      Black Dress

      Seven Stories to Die For

      Volume I

      Clifford Thurlow

      * * * *

      Digital Edition Published by YellowBay Books Ltd 2011

      http://www.yellowbay.co.uk

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright © Clifford Thurlow 2011

      The right of Clifford Thurlow to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

      All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers:

      YellowBay Books Ltd; info@yellowbay.co.uk

      ISBN 978-1-908530-04-2

      This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

      YellowBay Books is dedicated to edgy, daring and radical new writing.

      Let us know what you think at info@yellowbay.co.uk

      or visit Amazon and give the book a review.

      * * * *

      Stories

      1 - Black Dress

      2 - Tail Lights

      3 - Conjugations

      4 - Greek Fire

      5 - Oneshot

      6 - Calling Poppy

      7 - White Box

      About The Author

      * * * *

      Black Dress

      Vicky walks through a narrow mews she has taken by accident. She is only a few minutes from the club but feels lost, miles from anywhere. She comes to a stop outside a shop and gazes up at a little black dress that is short, sleeveless, unassuming. Like me, she thinks.

      The thought whisks away as her curiosity moves from the dress to the mannequin wearing it. She has long brown hair, brown eyes and sulky lips like she’s been waiting for a boyfriend and has reached the moment when she knows he’s not going to show up. The mannequin’s head is turned to one side and she has one leg slightly raised, as if she has better things to do than just stand there.

      As Vicky glances at her watch, she glimpses someone she doesn’t know in the window’s reflection and leans closer to make sure it’s her. She checks her hands, counts her fingers, then stares back again at the mannequin; her forlorn look is awfully real and she wonders how they do that, how they shape plaster and make it human.

      The mews is unlit and she has to wind through a series of horse posts that are leaning at odd angles along the way. Rain polishes the old cobbles staring up at her like a sea of eyes. Crossing Sloane Square is a test of wills. The traffic comes at you like fleeing rats and the Albanian girls with their headscarves and sleeping babies always make her think of the story of the Good Samaritan as she passes them by.

      The tube has the smell of a charity shop. Vicky finds it odd that people who own cars use public transport. In a car, you can listen to your own music, think your own thoughts. There’s no one to tell you what to do. She hangs from the overhead bar like an orang-utan, a book jiggling before her eyes, a backpack from some other passenger cuffing her about the ear. It belongs to a plump girl with blonde hair and an accent that drums like the train wheels, da-da da-da dum, da-da da-da dum, Norway or Finland, one of those places where they make luggage for exploring new worlds.

      She gives up reading and just stands there staring at herself in the carriage window. She’s wearing an anorak over a yellow jogging suit, the name of the club across her breast in green letters. Her eyes are glazed, her hair held back with an elastic band the postman has used to secure one of Fergus’s bundles of letters.

      When Vicky gets home, Fergus is browning cloves of garlic; there’s an Irish jig on the radio. He kisses her on the side of the mouth and the wiry hair of his beard goes up her nose and makes her sneeze.

      ‘Baby’s got a cold, some good hot soup’s what you need.’

      ‘A cold glass of wine’s what I need,’ she replies. She gazes at herself in his blue eyes until he blinks.

      ‘I’ll open a bottle. You go and rest.’ He turns to add a pinch of thyme to the pot. ‘How was your day?’

      ‘Cadaverous,’ she tells him. She likes this word and uses it whenever she can.

      ‘Poor baby.’

      She spends a long time sitting on the loo. It would be nice to find fault with Fergus, have a good row, break something, but Vicky doesn’t have the energy. She gazes around the room. There’s potpourri in a bowl and a row of miniature Buddhas Fergus has brought back from the Far East. They all have the same intense smile and seem to be checking she uses only one square of paper to wipe herself dry.

      She stands and turns to the mirror. Looking into her eyes is like opening a drawer full of forgotten things she ought to throw away. The future is a grey day in London, as inscrutable as the smiles on the plaster Buddhas. I’m twenty-three, an old maid, she says, then remembers she’d married Fergus during her last year at college. She’s a physical training pro, teaching thin women how to keep their husbands by growing cadaverous. ‘You can’t be too thin or too rich,’ they whisper, as if it’s original, hating her for being young.

      Her diploma hangs on the wall at the club. Fergus has degrees in all sorts of things and had been collecting a new one in Peace Studies when they met. He is one of those men you see on the six o’clock news with a faded shirt and earnest blue eyes surrounded by black people at famines and floods. Fergus is the voice of calm, a steady pair of hands, a brow furrowed and sown with congenital angst.

      In the early days of their relationship, Vicky would nuzzle against his neck, feel protected, as if his beard were an umbrella on a rainy day, a parasol in the sun, his shoulder a shelter in the storm. She had liked his long nose, the fact that he had few doubts and she agreed with his maxim that if you own more than two pairs of shoes someone in the Third World is going barefoot - and it’s your fault.

      She crawls into the wardrobe and counts three pairs of trainers, some sandals furred with last summer’s sand and a pair of walking boots she keeps meaning to polish. They are members of the Ramblers’ Association and when Fergus isn’t saving the world they go out to save a Public Footpath from a thieving landowner. Life is an endless battle of Little Things. If everyone did their bit about the Little Things, the Big Things would take care of themselves.

      She is leafing through her old clothes when her name comes singing up the stairs. For a moment she imagines it’s her mother calling and has to make an effort not to shed a tear.

      ‘Vicky. Vicky. V-i-c-t-o-r-i-a. Dinner’s ready.’

      ‘Coming.’

      ‘Don’t let it get cold.’

      Ah - nut roast, pureed parsnips, organic tomatoes in a sesame seed sauce. Fresh fruit. And a documentary about life on a Guatemalan coffee plantation. How we in the Developed World can torture the suffering swarms of Central America by actually drinking the stuff is a mystery that makes Fergus crack his knuckles and pull at his beard. He sits forward, glaring at the screen, and still notices out of the corner of his eye as she quietly refills her glass.

      ‘Naughty girl. Two units. That’s the limit,’ he says.

      ‘It’s only my second,’ she whispers.

      It’s a lie, of course, and Vicky is relieved that he doesn’t whip out some reading material from the World Health Organization. Fergus is so scrupulous about what she eats and drinks, Vicky’s convinced she’s going to live forever and worries sometimes that she isn’t living at all.

      She is playing with the candle wax and lets it burn her fingers.

      ‘Ouch.’

      ‘Now you know what happens if you play with fire.’

      His eyes are glowing, growing larger as he approaches with a kiss. ‘Up the wooden hill,’ he says, and she listens as he returns the wine to the kitchen, unscrews the cork from the opener, shoves the cork back in the bottle and sticks the bottle in the fridge.

      Fergus has an early flight next morning to Geneva and two days of very important talks. The running bath is a reminder.

      She strips off her nightie, makes a warm spot in the middle of the bed and discovers her sister’s face in the ceiling cracks. Fergus smells of banana shampoo when he climbs in beside her. He balances on one elbow to extinguish the lamp, wriggling at the same time from his pyjamas. He stretches her out as if she’s a roll of cloth, his knees slicing like shears between her legs, and he drums along like a sewing machine, shaping her fabric into an image he sees in his own eyes.

      Her eyes are pressed shut and she imagines she’s at the funfair riding the big dipper, going up and down, moving faster and faster. Warm air races over her bare arms and legs. There’s a strong arm around her shoulders. In her mind, she’s wearing the little black dress, new shoes. She surprises herself with the thought. She shrieks at the top of her voice and Fergus freezes like a bird shot in flight.

      ‘Shush,’ he says. ‘The neighbours.’

      The dress is still there when she passes on her way to work that morning. She returns at lunchtime. A woman sits at a desk writing in a ledger; she has the same accent as the ladies in the club but she isn’t thin and she’s plainly reluctant to take the dress out of the window.

      ‘It’s two hundred pounds, you know.’

      ‘Two hundred pounds? For a second-hand dress.’

      The woman winces, as if she’s drinking tea with too much sugar in it. ‘It’s

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