#whimperverse

The first night, the hairs on your arm rise noticeably enough for you to stop mid-sketch. You look up at the door but, on finding no one, look back down and continue drawing your moth orchid. The next night much is the same; mid-sketch you sit back to take stock of your completed sketch and bring your cup of steaming tea to your lips when a shiver passes over you. Instinctively you clutch your cup closer to your chest and this time you carefully assess the darkness surrounding the entrance of the cafe. Nothing. You sigh and shake your head, feeling very much a fool.

On the third night, you enter the cafe with hackles raised. Until now you’ve never considered the possibility that your late night forays would put you in danger. The cafe is very close to your apartment and the street is lined with other stores that keep night hours, and on top of that the cafe owner knows your routine so well that often your tea awaits your arrival. 

Perhaps your sleeplessness has made you stupid. 

Either way, you sit in your booth carefully that night and periodically check your surroundings to see… what exactly you’re not sure, but you want it to be either something or nothing. 

It ends up being nothing, but you don’t make any progress on the orchid.

A few uneventful nights pass quietly and your nervous system resets. The experience is alarming – unused to hypervigilance, you are experiencing a type of sleeplessness you’ve never experienced before. To say you’re exhausted would be an extreme understatement.

On the nth night of feeling like this, you trudge your way to the cafe with your bag and exhaustion in tow. The soft shoop of the door proves to be Pavlovian in its effect on you; shoulders sagging with relief, chest loosening, and eyes drooping. You nod at the owner who gives you a sympathetic grimace, take the cup of tea from him and try to ignore the rattle of the cup on the saucer.

You slink into your seat and close your eyes. Every cell of your body yearns for rest, yet it simply won’t come. 

Part of the misery of insomnia is the loosening of the brain – it feels like the screws that keep your sanity in place are unwinding just enough for minimal but constant leakage of energy and thought and feeling. The result is the painful irony of every waking moment feeling like a dream and the brain sparking to life when you try to sleep.

You’ve been making a few mistakes at work and dropping things at home. Albeit small, the mistakes make you anxious and so the vicious loop grows teeth. 

You look down at your bag and notice that it looks suspiciously empty. You check it and yep, you’ve forgotten to bring your materials. It’s happened a total of zero times and this is just the icing on the fucking shit cake. 

You’re so wrapped up in your monologue of self-pity that you miss entirely the swing of the cafe door. The soft, slow, heavy footsteps do not register at all until you are suddenly, piercingly aware of a body across you.

Heavy eyes open to the figure of Simon across from you, enrobed in black and a sentinel of seriousness. 

You’re struggling to understand his sudden appearance. 

After gaping for more than a moment, you manage to say, “Alright?”

Simon nods. 

“You’ve been away for a long time.”

He nods again. 

“It’s good to see you.” Out of politeness, but gladness, too.

He nods. “Same ‘ere.” He sounds as though he hasn’t spoken in a long time.

Even with your hazy mind, you can tell there’s something off about him.

So you try again, “are you okay?”

He evens you with a look. “Are you?”

Perhaps it should frustrate you, and it would on any other occasion, but you get the distinct feeling that he is being as genuine as you are.

You turn to glance at the moon. 

“No.”

He waits.

“It’s going to sound crazy but–” you frown, “for a few days it felt like I was being watched.”

You catch yourself and shake your head. “It is crazy… anyway, I’ve been a little nuts about it since. Sleep hasn’t been this bad in a long time. Maybe I’m just feeling a bit loony because it’s a full moon.”

You offer a wan smile that he doesn’t return.

Simon takes a deep breath. 

“I got injured. That’s why I was away for so long.”

“Oh! Are you okay? How bad was it?”

His heavy eyes answer for you. “Oh.”

“Mm. Was in 'ospital for a while. Got discharged two weeks ago.”

His gaze skitters away and for some strange reason, your breath quickens.

“Wasn’t ready to come back 'ere just yet… So I just waited…” 

He meets your gaze again, “and watched.”

Your insides are set alight. As bright as a supernova.

Tears jump forth. Their presence makes you lower your head.

Maybe you should be suspicious. Maybe you should be relieved to know your instincts were right. Maybe you should be afraid. 

You should be all those things, but above all else you feel taken care of, that maybe your fear of slipping away without anybody holding your hand or sending you off with a kind gaze won’t come true. 

As a child you had believed in a benevolent universe, and then your sister’s death had razed that belief to the ground. The acknowledgement that someone real, someone with a heart that beat and blood that rushed was looking out for you is almost too much to bear.

Simon’s hands travel over the table to cover your shaking fingers. 

Neither of you move to wipe them away. 

part i, part ii, part iii, part iv, part v, part vi

A weak part of you wants to believe that Simon is just another random man with a type – a man with a certain bloodlust for a broken young woman, only to run when the tide turns out to be stronger than the attraction. An even weaker part of you knows that’s ridiculous because at no point has he ever made you feel frail or unseen.

Still, it’s verging on three months now that you’ve laid eyes on him, and for the last meeting to have been so emotional… you can’t help but attach the emptiness to yourself. Strangely, you’ve been sleeping quite well over the last two weeks, even skipping two nights at the cafe simply because you slept through the night for the first time in years.

Tonight you’re back, tea in hand and art supplies set up the way you like them. Tiredness reigns your limbs but it’s quite soothing; the familiar lethargy allows your mind to slow down and your hands to begin sketching.

Sometimes you sit down with a clear idea of what you want to draw. Usually things are botanic in nature – flowers, grasses, rabbits and squirrels. Since you met Simon things have taken a different tone. You have found yourself drawn to the moon, its dips and crags and shadows and startling brightness in the cool hours of the night. At times it seems so bright you think you might just be able to see the shadows take on new forms. 

It took you a few weeks to parse out the motivation behind your new lunar obsession, but in the weeks of missing Simon’s strong and silent presence you arrive at the realization that somehow he reminds you of the moon – deep and still and paradoxical in its brightness. That and the fact that you’ve not seen him outside of the evening.

You flip through the last few pages of your sketchbook. It’s moon after moon after unerring moon. Perhaps you should try something different tonight. After a moment staring at the new page, you pick up your pencil and just… flow.

The jagged line down the left, following a slight curve that dips into the corner

The mottled surface that begins in the top left corner and extends just past the middle

The pock marks on the right cheek, three deep and other more shallow

The pulled right upper corner of the lip and the scar pulling it taught from the base of the ear

The abrupt shape of the right brow, halting right at the middle with a sloping burn scar that licks upwards into the hairline

You stop and take stock. Without knowing how or why you have mapped Simon’s face from scar to scar, ranging from the bottom corner of his jaw to his singed hairline. All that is missing are the details - his teeth, the shadow of his brow… his eyes.

You can’t bring yourself to begin working on his eyes. Despite your years of drawing you know you will draw a blank when it comes to filling the soul of his gaze. It’s almost comical because sharing a glance with Simon feels like staring into a clear river – you see through it, see into it, and see yourself all in the same moment.

The rest of the night is spent like that, looking at the edges and dips of your map of scars and filling in the details with a hand that just won’t move.

There are plenty of things to dislike about leave. Silence, for one. Long stretches of it make Simon feel catastrophically claustrophobic. He lasts about three days before he flees for the streets. Another is artificial heating and cooling. Hereford is like any other workspace and full of pencil-pushers and rolling chairs and air conditioning but for Simon, anything that departs from biting snow and obliterating heat is unbearable. The only things that keep him in his body are work, and the elements.

England’s lack of real summer means he only feels settled in his body during the winter. Before, he’d take long walks at night and note the homeless people on every new route. Doing his rounds. A kinder man would give them money. A good man would keep track of them. Since Simon is neither kind nor good, he merely notes their presence without a break in his step. 

Only, he does remember them, in his own way. When he falls back into bed every night the understanding that he too is emotionally and physically itinerant remains his last waking thought. The difference between him and them is merely the significant blood money sitting in his account. 

Sometimes he sees them talking to each other, sometimes laughing, and wonders whether it’s better to be homeless with comrades or to be alone, like he is, and forgotten, and so close to the brink of death as to be a walking sack of flesh. 

Before.

Before.

His life is clearly delineated into parts: mum and Tommy, Joseph and Beth, the army, the family, Roba Roba Roba… you. 

He remembers it clearly, with military precision. Eight days before Christmas and Price wasn’t able to wrangle a mission for him so he stoically resigned himself to white knuckling the season. The nights were as they always were during Christmas: full of gasping awake with a gun in hand, wet eyes and weak, sweaty knees. 

So he takes to walking the streets. 

They allow for a transformation of sorts – with every step the fearful animal that stumbles out of the flat fades until the ragged man returns home. 

That night, he’s still mostly beast when he spots you – wounded, vulnerable you – in the window of the late-night cafe. 

What occurs in his chest is painful and inexplicable; a flutter of boy-hood longing and adolescent loneliness. It makes him feel like a boy, and that makes him angry. The urge is to punch himself until his innards resemble fish chum, rancid and all kinds of red. 

And so there he is, boymanbeast standing in the darkness and with a pained heart, fixed on the lonely figure hunched in the diner. 

In retrospect, he remembers you and his reaction to you because you embody the single emotion that has reigned his little life. Despair. Time whittles away at the memory until the details fall away like scales and he remembers neither features nor clothing but the pure understanding of mutual suffering. 

He remembers his fingers being hot from the cold and he remembers nothing on the table in front of you. A sense memory erupts in his nose like a whizz-bang –

apple cider

mulled wine

pine

cinnamon

joseph, screaming

laughing

it’s okay

where’s mum–

blood– so much

oh tommy

beth my god beth

joseph, screaming

In a panic his feet move and he finds himself walking to the cafe, brain mush and hands burning more than before and he really doesn’t know what’s happening to him but then, the door is opening and the owner is there and he is in his sixties around five ten at most and seems harmless but Simon knows that no one is ever truly harmless, and the place is empty except for you and he doesn’t understand why you’re sitting so close to the window because there are no blinds and you’re both too close and too far from the exit if you were ambushed from the front or from behind so his best bet is to sit right in front of the door because the glass is polished enough for him to spot an insurgent from their reflection but he can also take out–

“Tea, sir.”

He looks up at the owner. The man has sad drooping eyes, but his expression is open.

“On the house, Merry Christmas.”

He has another cup in his left hand and shuffled a few paces to you. Pre-empting him, your face is turned up in watchful anticipation.

“Tea, miss.”

“Thank you Emir.”

All he sees is the way the moon catches your tear-stained cheeks. Your smile is small but genuine and you make no move to wipe anything away.

He takes note of your hands, how cold they look with their red fingertips, how stable they are cupping the tea.

He sees you with your hot tea and yawning sadness and realises that you and he are the same creature.

part i, part ii, part iii, part iv, part v, part vi, part vii, christmas special, part viii