J. H. Sked by Basement Blues Read Free Book Online

his eyes and exploded into lethal beauty.
     
    In his haste he dropped the torch from rapidly numbing fingers, the falling flare enough to see Danny loom up before the sobbing teenage girls and slam their skulls together with brisk efficiency. The torch landed with a sickening crunch on the floor of the carriage and died forever.
    Charlie wheezed and forced the last of the gas in the inhaler down his throat, panting and gasping and sobbing as the swollen tissue finally subsided.
     
    The lights flared back on, bright as the desert sun. The bodies were gone.
     
    Danny was sitting cross-legged on the seat opposite him, smiling. The copper rounds that had pierced his eyes gleamed and winked obscenely as the train screamed through the tunnels, a mortar on the final arc of descent.
     
    Charlie felt his chest crushed in a vice grip. Nerveless fingers dropped the empty, useless grey tube to the floor.
    “Hey Charlie,” Danny whispered, leaning forward and bringing the scent of open bowels and over-ripe meat with him. “Want to play a game?”
     
    As the train howled and farted towards the next stop, the lights buzzed and hummed and let the darkness in once more.
     
    This time, it stayed for quite a while.

Pushing Janey
    One
     
    P han saw her for the first time at Piccadilly Station, waiting to cram into the can with the rest of the sardines at five o’clock.
    Like dozens of others, she stood scanning a book, nibbling on a strand of blonde hair, glancing up every so often at passers by.
     
    Usually, he dropped his eyes when someone looked up, but he was slow today – it had been a long eight hours in the ledgers and his mind had been wandering over irreconcilable figures.
     
    When he realized she was looking back at him, he started, looking hastily away. She lowered her head back to the page, the few freckles on her broad curved cheekbones fading as the colour swept over them.
     
    As the train hissed into the station with an exhalation of dry hot breath, she glanced up at him once more, then smiled.
    Phan boarded the car behind her. He spent the rest of the commute staring into his folded hands, replaying the vivid flash of indigo eyes.
     
    Back home, grandfather had cooked, a hamburger each with a bottle of soda gathering dew in the fridge.
     
    “After forty years,” Phan said, shaking his head, “You’d think you’d get over this infatuation with junk food?”
    Grandfather cackled.“I’ll get over junk food when you get over your fixation with blondes!”
     
    Phan rose to stack the dishes in the sink. The old man watched the boy-child he had raised move gracefully around the cramped space.
    “Did you talk to this one, then?”
     
    Phan plunged his hands into the steaming water, watching them redden in the heat., “I don’t know what you are talking about,” he hissed.
     
    Grandfather opened his mouth, but Phan held up a hand.
    “Nor do I want to.” His tone making the other subside silently into his chair.
     
    Grandfather regarded Phan’s hand. The golden flesh ended abruptly at the wrist, became an angry red glove steamed by the water.
     
    ‘ Too much like your heart, my little one.’
     
    But he said no more.
     

Two
     
    P han saw her several times over the next few weeks, always in the evening press of homeward-bound office drones.
    Although he could never bring himself to speak, they’d nod towards each other as they waited in the dankness of the station platform. Usually, she smiled at him with her indigo eyes, her red-blonde hair.
     
    He wept when he first saw her face in the paper.
     
    Her name had been Emily Jane Ramsey, Janey to her friends. Single, not quite twenty-three, working as an office clerk.
     
    Phan went through the rest of the day an animated puppet, stiff and jerky as he tried to equate the girl who had smiled at him on the Piccadilly platform with the headline above her photograph: THIRD SUICIDE ON MAJOR LINE THIS YEAR.
     
    No, he thought. No and, no and,