Novel 2 - The 'Getting over Trauma and Coming of Age' novel

I have two novels in mind, both complete opposites and actually this perpetuates them being written when I get the old writer's block with one of them it helps to write something completely different for a while before coming back!

Did you know it twenty-five percent of the men it took to build the Hoover Dam died in the making. That’s one huge monolith. Can you even imagine it, looking down into that sheer face and seeing the unravelling strings of men like blackbirds screaming into the water. And now the tourists smile and take their pictures, incredible. Sometimes I come to these historic sites just so I can imagine myself in another time, like sitting in garden furniture at the overpriced Liberty Island coffee company and trying to capture in sepia memory the new immigrants seeing the outstretched arm and thrusting their own to the sky. I like reading newspapers, especially old ones, I like reading the ones that totally encapsulate the time, once when I was small we unbricked an old fireplace and there stuffed in balls into the chimney was a coal pocked daily from two decades before. I spent all day straightening it out and asking my mother what the words meant. Then I went and hid our own under the landing carpet in the hope that maybe in ten or fifteen years another family would uncover it and find the same wonder that I had. I supposed it informed what I would become, even the things that weren’t so common knowledge.
I lived in an Old Curiosity Shop – no, I shouldn’t start the story with a lie – my dwelling as the council like to call it was above the shop, though despite the necessity of a bed and kitchenette didn’t differ much in appearance. In particular, the men I brought home didn’t care for the deer head mounted above the bed except for Bill, but that’s a story. I like to think to look at something is to enter a portal of another life, there are so many lives I’d like to take of my skin and crawl into. Some people are only comfortable with the one life, I’ve had complaints from those types but then you’d think if they knew they were only at home with the ordinary then they should have the sense not to tinkle my bell.
‘I think it’s disgusting you have actual monkey’s head in your closet!’
‘It’s called taxidermy.’
‘You’ve named him! You Sicko, you think life is a joke’
I didn’t deign to answer this person and I won’t tell a lie the shop’s not going to make me the next Alan Sugar. Most of my customers are giggling school kids who sometimes buy a pencils or tourists who I like to make feel guilty for taking pictures of the displays, then maybe they’ll buy a shrunken-head sweetie bowl or novelty ashtray. But like all my precious finds, there’s more than meets the eye.

You will you won’t, you do you don’t, you say you will but you know you won’t rolls from the jukebox. He’d been rutting me for the good part of ten minutes, singing along thinking himself a regular Elvis his overlong fringe curling with sweat. He liked to come with three quick strokes, I think it reminded him of being out on the firing range, ever since he saw the Deer he became convinced this would impress me.
‘Well done Bill.’ I said as I arched my back to push his now cow-like bulk off of me.
‘Well done? I didn’t realised I was going for a prize.’
‘No darling you’ve already got the prize.’ I gave him a wet kiss and he smiled. He loved me giving him cheesy lines, made him feel like he was Frank Sinatra. Thank god he decided to roll off of me, I sunk into the pile of bedclothes watched the orange shadows of animals cast by the turning picture lamp. He smoked, what else would you expect from him.
‘I love how natural you are, you know? You’ve got this primal streak.’
I smirked. ‘Aha.’
‘Come hunting with me.’
A lamb made a perfect jump across the bedroom wall.
‘I’m only interested in what happens after the life’s been stamped out’
‘Come on, I think it will be good for you.’
‘It’s not my wellbeing I’m worried about.’
I knew he was serious when he turned over to lean on his arms. ‘You know the one thing I love about you is how you embrace tradition, you care about our ancestors, you take note of the past.’
‘There’s just one thing you love about me?’
‘I just think it would be very hypocritical for you not to.’
‘Hey Bill that’s a pretty long word.’
‘I’m serious.’
He was.
‘Death by my hands is totally different to death in my hands.’ I said.
‘I love you Cybil.’
He didn’t but he could stand a long silence thanks to all the fishing.
The words resisted like wax on my lips.
‘Fine a Pheasant, I’ll do a pheasant, stupid birds aren’t smart enough to keep out the road anyway’ I didn’t look at him, ‘We’ll call it a mercy kill.’
He felt for me beneath the covers and I melted into his hands until the alarm bell rang for seven.
Only the grease on the pillowcase remained of Bill. Sitting I pulled the woollen top sheet over my breasts and squinted at the liquor glow of sunlight painted in slats on the pulley door. I wished I could spend whole mornings in this warm nakedness and swum my legs between the smooth sheets. Radio 6 clicked on, in sync with the snooze alarm. Not today. I chose a woollen coffee jumper dress, tartan socks pulling up to knee and leather boots to cover them.
Downstairs my bottom sunk into the ripped and masking taped cushion of the old lazy chair and I pulled myself up to old oak desk I’d never sell. Sat here exposed to the elements, I thought of Dan, brandy high and crawling underneath as I spread my-legs and ruffled his hair. I giggled. The chime went. It took my mind a few moments to determine where my memory stopped and reality kicked in. A man with the face of a rain-cloud was upon the desk all of a sudden and I clamped my knees together inching the chair backwards.
‘Is the manager in?’
‘Yes sir, how can I help?’
He paused, wondering if I actually was the manager or just an idiot girl who hadn’t understood the question.’
‘I have these,’ he threw a rain-wet package onto the desk and I felt like I should have a gun in a bag to trade with him.
‘I see, may I?’
He looked away and I drew the thick old photographs from their dusty binding. There were creased and fingerprinted, curled from consistent thumbing..
‘These are exquisite.’
‘Are you trying to be funny?’ He spat like a rain cloud too.
‘No, not at all I love old photographs, the more battered they are the more loved the memories I always think.’ I smiled.
‘Yes, well.’ He said.
‘I suppose you’d like me to restore them for you.’
‘How much.’
I laid each one neatly onto the surface to take in the level of damage, discolouration, rips and tears, blur and contrast. Wrapping my fingers on the wood I already began to dismantle and reassemble their jigsaw.
‘I’ll tell you now they’re never going to be crystal clear but I can heal a lot of this, usually I’d charge twenty per picture but seen as this is a bulk order I’ll do them all for hundred.’
He paused for a long time and I played the game I play to decide if he was a walker or a taker. I’m pretty sure he hated the fact of the pay out but his prescience made the clocks tick louder and I sensed there was some gravitas behind his motivations.
‘Take good care of them.’ His voice softened.
‘Of course, our past is all we truly own.’ I only usually used this on men I wanted to sleep with but I knew like I knew the histories of things that this man needed to hear it, needed to know that I meant it.
He nodded at me. ‘Thank you.’
The jolly jingle of the door seemed desolate as a artic ice-cream van as he left.

‘Here’s your gun’ I pulled the collar of my trench around my neck to avert the weight of metal in my palms.
‘Cybil,concentrate.’
‘When the time comes.’
‘Here.’ He dropped it into the grooves of my elbows and I gave a little, rolled it down the my hands feeling smooth wood warm in contrast to the barrel masked in the chilly air.
‘Watch me closely.’
My eyes settled on the seas of hair curled about the v of his neckline. ‘To load you snap the barrel back like this.’
The jerk reminded me of the breaking of a chicken’s neck and all I could imagine watching him insert the cartridges was stuffing batteries into the throat of decapitated poultry.
‘Now you try.’
I pulled at the barrel as if struggling with a deck chair, relaxed tried again and it gave away to me, the thought of the swinging dead head still live with brain signals and blood veins almost made me vomit.
‘You okay?’ He asked, his scent drifting over on his breathe.
‘It’s just a very powerful tool that’s all’
He came about me and held my forearm as I fingered the bullets into the hollows.
‘That’s it, that’s all there is to it.’ But that was only the start of it, the bullets, the committal to the act, before he took my arm it was a heavy lump of steel and wood, something that I might have hung from the roof beams not it was an instrument of intent, to carry out the intent of death. How to fill this hollow time between the end of one thing and the start of dinner? The hunt I suppose they call it, the anticipation.

To be continued