Free Forget Yourself by Redfern Jon Barrett Page A

buildings.
    It was almost dark and I had just placed the needle on the stone before me. I was admiring my jagged work as Burberry appeared. She was wearing shorts I had never seen before, hanging beneath her best shirt.
    “You’re going tonight, then?” I asked.
    “I am.” Her voice had been heavy. I hadn’t asked where Tanned was. She leant over, neck resting on my shoulder. “Wow, Blondee, that’s wonderful. I didn’t know you could sew anything.”
    “I can’t, but as long as it stays on for tonight.”
    It was Ketamine who had taught me to sew after she had watched Rings at work. It had been a long time since I had seen either Ketamine or the jagged shards of her recipes. She had slipped into memory like a dream.
    “You’ll look great,” she’d said.
    We’d left for the casino together.
     
    I lost an apple, one of two.
    “I said I wanted both of you, Blondee. I did. I wanted you. I’d heard the rumours, I heard them from Ketamine herself—you loved more than one person. It’s possible for you. What if it’s possible for me? That’s what I told him.”
    And with her words falling softly into my ear the room fell silent and mouths pressed words through booze-dripped lips and cups chinked and dice rumbled but all inaudible.
    There were only her words, and her skin—and her leg pressing into mine.
    I didn’t tell her that nothing was deliberate, that I wasn’t even sure how I’d felt. I didn’t tell her because I rarely told anyone anything—there had always been other people to do that for me.
    My last apple vanished into one of the larger piles. I dropped my cards. The distraction was gone. I turned to face her, to see her staring at me.
    “He left. He called me all sorts of things. I hate him.” She looked thoughtful. “I think it’s really sad that you can hate more than one person but not love more than one person.”
    I turned the words over in my mind as her lips met mine, full and thick and heavy. Her hands grasped at my arms as she pressed her body into me, her tongue further into my mouth. I ran my hand over her back, unsure of what to do.
    Sound returned to the room
    a flurry of gasps
    and whispers
    and a cheer.
    I pulled my lips from hers, twenty faces watching us, some surprised and shocked, some looking to others to see what the fuss was all about. Somewhere I heard a voice, ‘They broke up this afternoon,’ and there were more grunts and hushes which fizzled all about us.
    “If you want another drink, just give me your cup,” Jay called to all from somewhere unseen.
    And her words echoed through my head as she took my hand and led me from the moist grasp of the casino-tent. Hand-in-hand we wandered to my triangle home, where I lit a small candle and she watched me, until she spoke, as softly as she had amongst the clatter of dice and cards and drinks and gossip.
    “He said you only love one person. Just one at a time. It’s not true, Blondee, it’s not true, I swear. I love you, Blondee—I have for ages. And I love—or loved—I love Tanned.” Her words were soft but they were quick, and brushed over me like shreds of velvet. “It doesn’t matter what it says in the book. We don’t know that’s right, he doesn’t know that’s right—perhaps some people do love two, or even three people, on the outside. He knew how I felt about you. He said that I should stay away from you and it would go away. That it was a crush and it would go away. But it didn’t, over all this time it just never went. And I wanted to see you but he said I shouldn’t.”
    She leant forward and kissed me again. I tried to untangle her words, to make sense of them as they still scattered about the air. She pulled back and continued.
    “He told me to leave. He just told me to leave.”
    And I reached over and pulled her to me. Her head rested on my breast and I felt her. It was more than despair, it was a desperate mix of despair and desire that had built in her and flowed into me. She kissed