Chapter One

Meet Stefan, the cold bachelor, ready to turn the most precious day of his sister's life into absolute chaos.

Good Looking Man About Town

 

 

            The days of good-looks and award smiles had passed him by.  Youth for him had been an endless parade of poetry, acrylic sweaters and cries of “ponce!” from the pub across the way.  He’d no time for foolish games of the heart.   Every time romance had dealt him a hand he’d found himself holding a fistful of clubs.   Love avoided him, it evaded him and he was grateful for it.   The boys who he’d strummed chords in back rooms with were now grown men all married with a tired wife and three fat children at their sides.  Any dreams they’d had died on chopping block of  “To have,” “to Hold” and “I Do.”   Love was but a fool’s game.  

            When he slept he dreamt of no one.   When he awoke he awoke alone.   That was how he liked it.   That was how he planned to keep it, no matter how the aging women in town tried to sway him.   And today would be quite a day open for sway.   At the age of forty-seven his sister, Sue Ellen, was entering into her third marriage.  It seemed wrong to him that a woman of her advanced years should still be swooning.   Even more puzzling was her enthusiasm to take vows despite having done it several times before.   Hadn’t she learned her lesson the first time? 

            He couldn’t even commit to a necktie longer than a season.  Seeing a woman for more than a few hours at a time was asking too much of him.  Even socially they were an angry ticking box of unhappiness and bondage.   Women.  Such beautiful, useless creatures…nearly as bad as men.   Yet, he adored every one of them with cold passion.  They were a treasure for his frigid blue eyes and a delight against his smooth steel tongue.  Had he been a man of certainty he’d’ve had a new one in his bed every night, but to his view everything below his belt buckle was a waste.  Flesh better spent stitched to another  than invested in him. 

            Hands too small and polite for a man straightened a silk peppermint striped tie, pushing the Windsor knot flush against the buttoned collar of a grey and black pinstriped oxford shirt.   He looked more a gangster than botanist in his tailored slate suit with his greying hair brushed back and up from his face.   His once lanky build had succumbed to solidity and firm stockiness with age.  A small man, all too masculine, with a wave of female sensitivity, stood before him in the mirror.  Over fifty-years he’d had to adjust to this fellow, yet he was a stranger.  A face that only a blind woman could love stared back into his eyes.   Kempt sideburns, grown in his thirties to define once chiselled cheekbones now accented crows’ feet at the corners thickly lashed eyes.   A pair of eyebrows, unchanged since boyhood, stood in tidy triangles beneath his long forehead, and on either side of stress lines above his long English nose.  A split in the cartilage at the end of his snout gave his face attractive character adding almost a shade of whimsy to an otherwise serious expression. 

            Thick lips, often set in a frown, were framed by contours formed from the occasional smile.  A slight crease several centimetres below his full bottom lip half-mooned down to his sturdy chin.  Rectangular and oval all at once it gave him the look not only of a brawny jaw but also of manhood he’d have preferred to reject.  He was listless, daydreaming and scornful as ever; still the boy he’d never outgrown, even if outward appearances spoke only of a solitary silver-aged man afraid in spite of everything of having his heart smashed under a satin heel.

            “You clean up well, Stefan.”  Another man said with a firm cuff of his right shoulder.   Behind him stood the groom, his brother-in-law, a sharp-faced lawyer from Camden.  Phillip Chandler, a name synonymous with high-billed cases and rich widows with silicone breasts.   Considering his sister was neither it was difficult for Stefan to see through well-dressed lawyer’s rouse.  

            “Uh…You too Phillip.”  He spoke in a voice clean and deep.  It was neither emotional nor indifferent.  It simply was.

            “Com’ed, Stef.  Call me Phil.  You’re my China now.”  The lawyer embraced his brother-in-law and half-heartedly his brother-in-law hugged back.  There was no shared affection, only an inner cringing on the part of the bachelor.  He could feel the noose of Christmas holiday around his neck, visualizations of the lawyer and his sister in matching jumpers clouding his eyes.  He had never been fond of family affection and to the same degree matching clothing.  Marriage was a partnership, not a military obligation.  In his eyes, it was as appealing as being sent to the front line. 

            “Do you have the time?”  He inquired of the lawyer after looking at his own wrist to see his Omega was not there.  It was the same watch James Bond wore.   No better than any other watch, but he worn because like 007 he was a single man with an expendable income.  Family men wore knockoff Rolex, married men the real deal and bachelors the best of everything.  The lawyer flipped his wrist, looking at gold-square against starched white cuff.

            “Nice call, Old Chap.”  He cupped his shoulder once more,  “I need to be getting to the altar!   Give my love to Sue Ellen for me, will you?  Oh!  What am I saying!   I’ll be kissing her soon enough.  But you will tell her I’m counting the minutes, won’t you Stef, Old Boy?  How splendid of you!”  While speaking he gave no room for reply, not that there was any interest in the other party on returning conversation.  He gave but a simple nod, turning his attention back to the mirror.  Behind him the lawyer exited, the scent of church incense burning his nostrils as the door swung. At his back had left a man, simple but hardly quiet who could not understand the mess he was sealing himself into.  There were reasons Ellie had been married twice before, all of which more bothersome than the solitary lock of dark silvering hair that had escaped his quiff and was now bouncing playful at the corner of his forehead.  Expression set in stone he pushed it back in place with the brunt of his hand.  Outside the dressing room doors the sound of chatter had hushed as the organ tuned.

            She’d be walking soon and he’d have to be there to hand her off.  Times like this caused him to miss his mealy-mouthed mother and toothless father.  Giving away a woman as empty and fat as Ellie was a weight that should not have fallen on any mother’s son.   She loved more than the lawyer goose fat butter, processed pork f*****s, marrow bones, blood pudding, kidney pie and traditional breakfast fry-ups.   In the years since Henry (the only proof besides the divot in her plump finger where a wedding had sat that she had been married previously) had joined the military she’d ballooned.   She savoured Melton Morwbray Pork Pies as much as her brother savoured solitude.   Loneliness created the strangest of creatures. 

            Food was her comfort, cynicism his, an attitude which he painted clearly as he entered the Bridal hall.   Spilling atop a cinched in mermaid gown bending at the boning Sue Ellen looked an absolute glowing mess.  Her bingo wings pinched atop white opera gloves and up swept hair shrinking her already diminutive face made all fifteen-stone ten-pound of her one dizzying white torrent.  A bridesmaid stood in front of her pinning her veil in place, a tradition of which had started so a man could not back out of an arranged marriage should he find the woman’s face unappealing.  It was a tradition gladly upheld that morning, though it was the bride’s sordid personality that created the larger threat of retreat. 

            “Still wearing Melancholia 1987?” She chirped.   At the age of forty-seven she was still caking red lipstick and dying her hair the colour of a rusted faucet.  From behind the veil her face, so similar to his own, flashed like neon in the red light district.  Heavy blue eye shadow and  black cats eyes  tipped off with an extra layer of rouge on her cheeks!  It was enough to make him march to the altar and advise the lawyer to run.  A favour from man to man that would leave his kin sour faced and glaring for the remainder of his unholy days.  His own skin mattering more than that of the empty casket of  marriage he was playing a role in his heels remained glued to the tile.  He offered her his arm at their respectable place in line. 

            Having rehearsed this same stiff procession time and time again for her former ceremonies he felt conversation a waste.   There was nothing to express that wasn’t of venomous disgust towards marriage’s institution.  For that indeed was what it was:  an institution established by the church and government to bind two naïve people out of their freedom. 

            “Oh, Stef!”  She frowned deeply, taking his arm and lifting up her veil to peck lightly at his cheek, “Can’t you give us a smile?   For me?  On my wedding day?”    Her blue eyes could not plead with his.   Just as she was set in her decision to wed he was set in his mood.  Self-satisfaction mingling with sorrowful superiority.  He’d transcended from the desires of man.  He was happy as a Roman eunuch without the procedures or blessings of slavery.   A man free of desire was a man of sound mind.  And he was such.   Unlike those saccharine impulsives who ran about in the constant quest of love equal to their hallow lust he lived a life heavy with intellect, purified to only the most intense level of pleasure.  Passion was not worth the sacfice of logic.  Fifteen minutes in the warm body of a dim witted girl was no thrill in comparison to the conquest that was becoming a sentient being. 

            “You’re only going to deepen those frown lines, Stef, and then people will believe you’re our father, not me brother.”   Sue Ellen tried against her sibling’s will to lighten the mood.  Anger seared the edges of the rose pinned to his lapel through his suit jacket.  Rage, pathetic and primal as the Neolithic ceremony he was held at jam and butter knife point to commit to, poured from an invisible basin in his chest.    The smooth manner he’d carried since boyhood surfaced as he placed his right hand against his breast and ripped free the flower.   Pin piercing his calloused flesh, he did not wince.  Opening his fist with force he let the rose topple across the room with violent force. 

            “Stefan, don’t do this.”  Sue Ellen commanded over her breath.   The deed had been done and heads were turning.  Behind them, Magenta, a man in bridesmaid drag was whispering assumptions into the other girls’ ears.   Their gazes on him and the droning of the bridal march beginning he could not hold rigid under the pressure.   He wanted to spit in the minister’s eye and smear his sister’s make-up.   It was an immature gesture, but it would get his point noted.   Marriage was not his war.  He wasn’t going to dance at the deployment ceremony.    He was calling a taxi, going back to his flat and leaving early for his summer holiday.

            “Please, Stefan, they’re all staring.   Smile, yeah?”  She pleaded, “Can’t you at least pretend to be happy for once in your life?”   Her voice grated on him, bordering on tears and screaming of frail womanly emotions.   She was fat.  She was stupid.  She was his sister, and she filled him with the only human passion he embraced: that of hate.  Viciously he unlocked his arm from her’s and headed to the side of the room.

            “Stef, please!  Don’t worry about the flower, will you?”  The bride begged. She was barding on panic.  He could only hope she’d be distraught enough to call off the wedding.   He was doing them both a favour by acting on impulse. Neither could see it yet. 

            “Stef, Com’ed!”  She whimpered, her thick lips trembling as he passed his lapel pin, shoving for the exit door.   Any who stood in his way cleared.   With that build, in that suit he looked dangerous, when really all he was happened to be a poet who refused to open himself to Miss Right. 

            “STEFAN!”  Ellie’s voice blasted through the swinging door.   At the altar heads were turning and the pews were a sea of whispers.  What was going on just beyond the room was left up to speculation, making the situation far more dangerous than the reality inside.  Stefan was a liberator, bitter that no one followed his lead.   Fools.  The lot of them.

Reviews

[N/A]

I really really enjoyed reading this. I'm unsure where it's set, interestingly...though,that seemed totally irrelevant as you built up plot.

It reads a bit like one of those short stories that win prizes in literacy festivals.(That is a compliement)

You managed to give Stefan depth in a very short piece, which is something I've always struggled to do when writing stories. It's wonderful, you create this image of him in my mind.and stupidly I begin to relate it to people I know.

It seems pleasingly English-upper class...but not archaic...maybe that's just me. Reading from a British perspective.

Anyways, wonderful work! I hope to read more soon

[Livana Lowell]

Wow, I was captivated by the description to be honest. I was looking for something offline and I loved this so much, I signed back on just to review.

I read from the first line to the bottom, not able to stray my eyes. Not even for my mp3 player that has recently switched to a song I don't like.

The characterization is so pure and expressed that I could imagine this bitter man wrapped in stubborness and his dark view upon common things like love, marriage, and age.

Besides the fact that I'm not of that age yet, I can relate to his feelings because my thinking entwines with his.

And on top of that, I laughed at a lot of things. I love the dialogue; it's so rich and credible. I can't wait to read more, actually.