It isn’t always possible to choose your neighbours. I think the sense that when it comes down to it there is a sense of community, that the people around you will have your back. Although it isn’t always possible to really know the people around you, what is actually going once those doors get closed and the curtains drawn.
It puts me in mind of a short story I put together a few months back. This is Gordy’s place.
GORDY’S PLACE
A short fiction, by Gavin Turner
Gordon woke to find the lawn in front of his small bookshop on fire. The flames licked the trunk of a Magnolia he planted last summer, for his wife. The lawn would regrow, but the books. He needed them to not be burned. Not again.
The trio in the basement crouched over the reading table, a green light glowing. They were forming again, narrating, growing stronger. It felt good, alive. A fire was a fine inciting incident. Young stuffed the lighter fluid in his back pocket and smirked.
“That should get things going hey? Remember how mad he was when I kissed Selina, in the space beneath the bandstand?”
The others nodded.
Gordon returned to the house and tried the basement door, locked of course. He strode over to the small bureau and pulled out the journal.
I remember when we went to the lake. It was late March, the water too cold for swimming. When the small fishing boat began to sink, we screamed and splashed our way back to shore, cabin, set the fire, made love under the blankets, I remember Selina, I remember.
The lawn fire was dwindling. Young was nervous. “We must do more, more”
“I locked the door” said Dark. “I remembered Magnolia day”
That was the worst and best day. Spring in the garden, planting it in just the right spot, before she dropped to the ground. Magnolia day, the start of the end.
Gordy always tried to focus on the good times, the happiness. He wrote them down. But sometimes the hurtful memories would return, drag themselves to the surface, he tried to rid himself of them.
“Now the last chapter” said Fin, “I remember, buying the rope, learning the knots”
Young and Dark nodded and grinned.
Gordy remembered the day of the rope, and the magnolia, how they fitted together. The wooden champagne case from the wedding that he stood upon.
‘Every time it hurts, write it down and put it away’ Selina had said. He promised her. But they crept back at night, played tricks, undid him.
He knew every single detail about that day. But they forgot the broken branch, or perhaps he did not write that bit down, perhaps that was still his secret. Sometimes he forgot to lock the door. Sometimes he remembered the kiss beneath the bandstand, but perhaps that was another girl.
In the basement, the memories, Young, Dark, Fin, shrank and withered, closed themselves in dusty covers and waited for the next night. Someday they might escape, and not be a secret anymore.
The lawn steamed smoke into the damp night. Gordon closed the journal. “She called me Gordon, it was everyone else who called me Gordy, I forgot that, or it was secret, wasn’t it Selina?”
Selina didn’t answer, perhaps still dead, or a secret. That was how he survived, between forgotten things and the secrets. That was how he survived every day.
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