Here’s a piece of Flash Fiction – I wrote it on the 16th August – the anniversary of the death of Elvis.
Eric drives with purpose. He’s driving an emerald green Ford Cortina with sticky black plastic seats, four balding tyres and a radio which is on, music blaring. It’s Eric’s first car, bought from hard earned money working in the Post Office, in the accounts department. By day he works at balancing books and by night uses this learned craft to build savings.
It’s a balmy August day and he’s heading for a far-off forest, tent, fishing rod, axe and airbed in the boot. Eric is used to camping, doing so in childhood with his dad, an old scout leader. This man knew his poles and pins, and also his guy ropes, passing on knowledge to Eric, who came to love this life. He loved the fresh sharp aroma of the pine trees, the dry pine needle carpet and the pine cones. He made statues with the latter, piling them up with acorns and twigs. Eric’s dad used to say he was artistic. Eric would agree before wielding his catapult and shooting down his nutty creation.
Not everyone had liked his artistic prowess. When he was six, he’d made a collage in class. It had caused quite a fuss. The adults insisted on speaking endlessly to him about it, asking what were his thoughts about this and about that? They meant the mad axe-man, of course, running through the cut-out trees from his dad’s Scot’s Magazine, following another man, chopping the air with a large wood-cutter.
Eric knew every single tree and shrub, knew their specifications, the height they grew to, the best position for them. If he’d lived in the noughties, which I’m sure he went on to do, but I’ve still to form that story, I’ve no doubt he would have been a tree hugger. But that’s not a bad thing. A tree is a life, albeit you cannot take it out on a date.
Suddenly, the car shudders to halt in the layby. Eric rolls down his window, flings out a hasty look before picking up his map. He thought he knew where he was going, had studied the map before setting off, but now frowns. Bloody radio interference. That’s what put him off. The crackling, the buzzing ground into his bones, right in the middle of Cat Stevens. Eric is passionate about music, taught himself guitar aged thirteen and now, some seven years later, he’s an accomplished player. Listening and playing music helps get rid of the pent-up emotions, as well as the mean words of a guy at work. ‘What girl’s gonna take you on, sad boy,’ he’d said many a time.
‘So, where did I go wrong?’ Eric asks himself as he scans the map. Ah, he’d veered right instead of left. Suddenly the radio restores itself, yowling around Hound Dog. Eric sighs as he gets out to stretch his legs, smoothing down his flared trousers which had a chic check to them. They were part of a suit, the jacket wiggling in the back of the car. A trilby too, in the back seat. It was forest green, to match the green check on his trousers, a band of gold around it, the gold accentuating his amber eyes, a black leather briefcase peeping out from underneath.
There’s another car in the layby and Eric sees a girl in the driver seat. Her head is down, touching the steering wheel, her red hair strewn across it. Eric falters, makes to walk towards it, falls back, makes to walk towards it, falls back. In the end, he walks towards the car and knocks on the window. ‘All, ok?’ he asks the red-haired girl to which she picks up her head and turns towards him, her pale face saddened. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she gushes through her pearly teeth and Eric steps back and raises his eyebrows. ‘What?’ he asks, looking down at his gear. ‘The King is dead,’ she says in a whisper. ‘He can’t be.’ Eric’s eyes waver. ‘I heard it on the radio,’ she shoots back. ‘Elvis is dead.’
Eric stands, frozen, not knowing what to say and watches as the girl gets out her car. She’s tall and slim, has on a buff-coloured jump suit, showing off a tiny waist. ‘Such a loss,’ she says, shaking her head, and blinking. At those words Eric shakes his left leg, wiggles and jumps about, holding an air guitar, and he begins singing, something about being a teddy bear. His lips curl. ‘You can sing,’ says the girl. ‘I saw Elvis in Memphis,’ Eric tells her, leaving out that he’d caused a stir, disappearing to America aged seventeen, no one knowing where he’d gone. The police were involved, he’d taken money from his father’s money stash under the bed, psychiatrists attended, and social workers, none of whom understood his compulsion to see Graceland.
‘You could become an Elvis impersonator,’ she says moving closer to him, handing him a crushed-up newspaper. ‘Chip?’ she asks. ‘Thanks.’ ‘Got them in the chippy back there.’ She points south. They sit on the verge and Eric speaks about bands, soloists, guitar chords, piano chords, minor and major scales. He lies back and croons a soft melody, the girl looking on. ‘Do another Elvis impersonation,’ she says. He sits, looks at her, eyebrows raised, and she nods, arms waving him up. ‘Ok.’ He stands, shakes his legs out, and then his skin pales. He’s looking over the girl’s head into the distance where he sees four black cars trawling towards them. A crow cackles from the trees beyond the verge. The four cars swerve into the layby, tyres crackling on the grit, four black clad men stepping out, a stone rolling. They walk towards Eric and the girl and she watches as he holds his hands out, palms up. She looks on with lips full of questions. Sometimes the answer can be a question, like…’Will you be coming quietly?’
Jimjan's Journal 