ST2.3 | "Alan and Felix"

PROMPT: A time for renewal and celebration. A time for all that death to be swept away. But not here. This month, we’re looking for stories of people who refuse to deal with the reality of their situation, and how their denial leads them to triumph, or doom, or, maybe, acceptance.

ALAN AND FELIX

by L.P. Ring

When Alan lost his first tooth, Felix wedged out his own with pliers from the toolbox beneath the sink. He bled all down his white t-shirt, leaving splotches on the linoleum and cabinets that near gave Mom a heart attack when she brought in the washing. When Felix got picked for football, Alan practised every evening after homework until he got picked too. When Felix had his first kiss, lost his virginity, had his first break-up, Alan wasn’t far behind. When Alan took evening tuition to secure his A-levels, Felix did too. They aced their exams but went to a local Polytechnic to stay close to Mom. She was ill two years by then.

Big brother Felix didn’t labour being fourteen minutes older too often, having promised Mom he wouldn’t pick on his brother before cancer took her just shy of their nineteenth birthday. But he did like keeping score, keeping things competitive.

Competition brought out the best in them.

Felix’s first was sloping between the library stacks, ferreting for an Isak Dinesen collection for her Early 20th Century Lit. class. She had lank black hair like a Bassett Hound’s ears, glass lenses thick enough to stand a coke on, and mommy and daddy’s chip-shop bulk. She stood transfixed while Felix discussed Out of Africa—he’d seen the movie—endearingly incognizant of the line this God was spinning her. Few men paid attention to Shirley Harris, let alone a third-year from the university rugby team whose upper arms stretched his t-shirt’s fabric close to tearing. She stuttered an acceptance when he invited her for cheeseburgers—his guilty pleasure—after the library shut.

She’d have died of embarrassment at the secondary school portrait her parents chose for her missing person’s poster.

Alan sat across from his choice at lunch three days later. “You’re not picking a date,” he remembered Felix warning him. “Get someone nobody’ll remember.”

His choice was unsuitable enough—tall, willowy, with a brush of nose freckles and breathlessly blonde hair flowing between her shoulders. But when Alan carried her books to her next class, Felix could’ve chased him down the corridor and throttled him. “I’ll pick someone else,” Alan yelled later, smouldering in the passenger seat of Mom’s battered Ford Sierra.

“No blondes,” Felix sniped as they weaved past rear traffic lights set red and sullen in the twilight. Bruno Brooks was talking up the upcoming 600th Number One and Felix let out an “Oh bloody shut up!” and switched off the radio. “Dark. Plain. Frumpy. Blondes attract attention. Blondes bring Candlelit Vigils and headline news.” The slur he used next made Alan blanch.

“Mom would slap your mouth for saying that.”

“Mom’s dead two years and like the movie, ‘I ain’t afraid of no ghosts.’ Fuck whatever Mom would say.”

Later, Alan knew that was when they started drifting. Yet soon after, with the ground almost too frozen to dig and the wind ripping the few leaves left from the trees, a first-year disappeared cutting through a park after dark. And, perhaps initially as a middle finger to Felix, Alan kept seeing the blonde. Six months later, Shirley Harris was a tattered page on a lamp post only her parents mourned and gossipy neighbours remembered. Alan’s eventual choice never warranted proper attention. The police, seeing education but also colour, never considered the two disappearances together.

Both brothers graduated with honours. Felix got a position in the City and pestered his younger brother to follow. Alan talked up local growth, quibbled over the salary a similar City concern offered, and thought about the blonde a year from finishing her teaching degree. One night they exchanged gasps of “I love you” between fumbled, sweat-slicked trysts.

Felix smashed a glass off the kitchen wall. “I said choose a kill, not a fucking wife. You think she’d stay with you long if she knew how close she was to being on the evening news?!”

Alan reckoned she never would know unless Felix wanted company in Wakefield Prison.

Felix left, Alan stayed, did the books for a local builder, and eyed a three-bed on the outskirts of town. Felix wrote letters with fleeting mentions to women’s names as rarely repeated as orchids bloom—letters which were turned to ash via the embers of a cigarette in the back yard after Alan finished downing a couple of cans.

Alan went down on one knee during a weekend away in Paris. When he told his brother, Felix said what happened to Mom and Dad would happen to Alan as well—they were their mother’s sons, weren’t they?—and hung up without another word.

Alan gripped the phone, remembering the time they’d come home from training early to find Mom struggling with a guy she’d picked up hitchhiking. The kitchen knife was embedded deep enough in his neck for the blade’s point to stick out the other side. She sent them both to their room, though Felix kept sneaking down to see what she was doing. Eventually, Alan found out from whispered exchanges beneath the covers, she’d needed Felix’s help.

On their wedding day, Felix sent a bouquet signed by him and someone named Monica, citing a previously booked trip abroad. “This must be serious,” Alan’s now wife remarked, seeing how Felix’s brush-off stung. “He’s taking her for a week away.”

Alan’s library visit waited until after the honeymoon. The names from Felix’s letters, burned into his treacherous memory, were all there in the blurred microfiche of missing persons dotted up and down the country. Probably soon to be joined by Monica from the bouquet who might not have even made it back from their trip. Alan finished his searches, dropped into a nearby off-licence for a bottle of whiskey, and drove to a forest a few short miles from their old campus. He’d been right about a phone box being there and the phone at the other end of the line rang and rang. Finally, his brother picked up. He might have just been running.

“Felix?”

“Persistent bugger, aren’t you? What do you want, little brother?”

“I’m over at the old campus, next to that woodland. Do you remember her?”

“I remember mine. All she wanted out of life was to be an English teacher and eat fast food. God, what a waste of a life that would have been.”

“How’s Monica?”

“How’s your wife?”

“This needs to stop, Felix.” The thought of Felix getting caught and destroying both of them threatened to leap from his lips but he managed to choke it down. He didn’t want to sound like a coward. He refused to be the type of person who only cared about his own lousy skin. Refused to appear that way to Felix.

“Careful, Alan. Remember old memories can poison your present. As can threatening me.” There was a click and Alan was alone with a dial tone.

He sat in his car until the bottle was half-drank, listening to Capital Radio and staring into the trees. Ignoring the dog walkers, ramblers, and teenagers that gawped at the weird guy just sitting behind the wheel getting wasted. Flecks of snow danced from the deep grey sky, disappearing into the ground, or dying on the windscreen.

He thought of his only attempt at a kill, how she wriggled from his half-hearted grasp and ran.

How Felix chased her down, dragged her into the forest. Made him stab her the final time.

He pictured the ground beneath the 100-plus-year-old oak where he’d buried her alone.

That night, he remembered, each time he’d forced the shovel’s blade into the earth, he’d been certain that a cop, security guard, or even just an unlucky forest rambler would come across him finishing his grisly task. He remembered the relief he felt patting down that final shovelful of clay. Walking away, he’d promised himself he’d never return here.

As he finally relented and screwed the cap back on the bottle, he realized that being found then would have been the best thing of all. It would have stopped Felix. It would have saved the blonde from marrying him too.

He and Felix no longer did everything in unison. But big brother wouldn’t quit keeping score. Alan retrieved the shovel he’d stuck in the trunk that morning and, burnished both against the cold and the prospect of punishment by the whiskey, stalked into the forest. Back to where his youth ended, where this road to destruction began.

He kept insisting to himself that the grave wouldn’t be hard to find, that his memory would stand him in good stead. And then he would drive to the station, admit everything. Tell the police where to find the body. Tell them Felix’s address. He couldn’t change the past. And the present was well and truly poisoned. But he could save at least some of the future.

L.P. Ring (Twitter—@L_P_Ring) is a writer and teacher from Cork, Ireland. He’s been published with Mythaxis, Shotgun Honey, and Fleas on the Dog among others. He lives in Japan with his wife and a cat which is always around at mealtimes.