Basement Archive Room

It's an 8 page ebook.
Well, pdf.
It's a sort of partial archive.

Basement Archive Room

Print it off, pass it along. e-mail it out to your friends.
I'd appreciate it.

There'll be more.

Goodnight.

The Suit: Pt 2

The next twenty minutes were chaos. Adam’s hangover was forgotten, his father’s just beginning. Armed with a hoover, bin bag and duster, he became the general of an aged one man army; waging holy war against The Filth and The Mess. The work was frantic but short. Soon they found themselves sitting across from one another at the dining room table holding mugs of coffee with the smell of Mr Sheen placed firmly in their nostrils.

Silence pervaded as they stared each other down.

There hadn’t been any shouting when the bombshell was dropped. Just an awkwardness. Some Dizziness. Adam found himself sitting down. His mother was dead. He tried to imagine the concept: it escaped him. It was a slippery fish he kept trying to catch with hands covered in jelly. He could have asked the why and how, but they were too abstract and obtuse. Instead he found himself worrying over the real and the present; their situation as they sat in a house of filth, waiting for his aunt and Granny to arrive. They wouldn’t be impressed; all their prejudices against the male half of the species would be conveniently confirmed.

So he solved their problem and now they were left with the original one: the abstract and the obtuse. He thought of interrogating the older, mirrored version of himself for answers. He could have done. All of the difficult questions would have been answered with ease. But he couldn’t.

“I had better get ready.” He got up, grabbed his holdall, and floated up the stairs.

His bedroom remained the same as ever, yet emptier than before. The funeral suit remained in its original bag, recently dry cleaned; the label still safety-pinned on. He put it on half-heartedly and went to check himself in the mirror in his parents’ room (or rather, his father’s room. Singular: parent. Just a father. No mother).

He was a semi orphan. He checked himself, noting that he had lost weight and then he noticed the bed. In fact, he noticed half of the bed, the half that remained pristine and unused; the half that was left null and void. Her book remained unfinished by the side, the queen of hearts still sticking out the top as a forever temporary bookmark. The edges remained straight and the corners unbent. Everything was in order. She was a pristine woman. How could she have left such a mess?

The shrill cry of the doorbell woke him out of reverie and sent him down the stairs. He was greeted at the door by his stern grandmother and prude aunt.

“Hello Granny. Hello Aunt Meg.” Granny grabbed him by the shoulders and rather than hugging him, shook him fiercely.

“Oh, my poor little Addie.” She tutted in a thick Scot accent. An echo somewhere repeated: “poor, poor little Addie.”

“Such a terrible way to go,”

“Terrible, terrible.”

“Actually Granny-“

“Where’s your father?”

“Just through there,” he pointed half heartedly. “Granny, what did you mean by-“

“Oh, that silly man, I always knew he would be the end of her.”

“Silly man.”

“What are you talking about?” He almost shouted out, but somehow managed to restrain himself.

“Oh I’m sorry Addie, how rude of me. I forgot to mention we bumped into that lovely friend of yours.”

“So lovely.”

“Who?”

“She ‘s finding a spot to park.”

“Granny, who are you talking about?”

“You know, the pretty one. Such gorgeous blonde hair.”

“You mean-“

“Hello Adam.” Walking up the path dressed in black, her hair running freely, was his ex-girlfriend.

“-Eve.”

The Suit

It was in late September, just as the trees were beginning to turn shades of gold and auburn. A few weeks earlier Adam had moved into his new apartment, the first place that he ever considered to be truly his own. In the sense at least that he was the sole tenant (it was rented), that it was of reasonable quality and that he intended to stay for a while longer than a year. Taking these three factors into account meant that, in his opinion, the past three years living in student digs hadn’t counted as moving away from home, but rather that it had been something more of an extended trip, or life-lesson. It also meant that the rest of his earthly possessions needed to be boxed and moved because, as his mother had so eloquently put it: “We’re turning your room into a spare bedroom; and that doesn’t mean that you can let your friends stay in there when you come to visit.” Hence, he was planning to head home and complete the move, which actually only involved shifting two boxes of books and his funeral suit (which had only been worn once, at his grandfather’s funeral a year earlier). The plan was to head down on the Friday and come back on the Sunday. A simple plan, he hoped.

A few days before the Friday, he received a phone call from his father to confirm that he was, in fact, coming home for the weekend.

“Don’t worry about it Dad, it’s all sorted.”

But then of course he was lying.

A separate set of circumstances that occurred whilst he was heavily drunk resulted in him double-booking himself on the Friday night in question. These set of circumstances also happened to have occurred whilst he was deep in conversation with the attractive girl from IT at a spontaneous office outing (which he later discovered was all too common). He was carefully informed by several colleagues that you only got one chance with the attractive girl from IT and that if he had means and opportunity, he should take it. The result was that he was forced to phone his father on the Friday afternoon, make up a work related excuse, then promise him he would arrive first thing in the morning. Of course, he didn’t arrive first thing in the morning, because he was still slightly drunk at that time and didn’t want to wake up the attractive girl from IT, who he discovered quietly snoring on his pillow. He happened to note that she seemed fairly plain without any make up on but that he didn’t mind at all and that this just added to her charms.

When he did finally come home at a time closer to midday, he found that the house was in a mess and the curtains drawn. There were at least three bottles of Scotch in various states of emptiness and old take away boxes littered almost every open surface above the floor. The ash tray on the coffee table was full of black-grey detritus and at the head of that table, sitting almost ceremoniously, was his father; garbed in a black suit with his shoes polished to a shine and a half burnt-out cigarette placed between index and middle fingers. His top button remained undone and his tie untied. The greying mess of hair on his head looked ruffled and the lines in his face seemed somehow… deeper.

“Jesus, what’s going on?”

“Hey, son.” The middle aged man huffed and lifted himself out of the chair. “You got here just in time, your Granny and Aunts are about to arrive.”

“You look like you’re dressed for a funeral!”

“That’s because we’re going to one.”

“What do you mean?” Silence. “Dad?”

“It’s your mother. She died last week.”

Cereal

I think I'm going to start a serialised story and call it something like 'cereal'. And, seeing as so far I've hardly put up any illustrations, I thought it should be in ten parts in the format text, art, text art, text, art, etc.

No?