Old Friends

I

The late morning was clear and crisp as Sawyer Roth stepped out of the travel hostel. Suddenly, an overpowering smell of roses assailed his nostrils, followed by a taste like sour milk. He clasped his hands over his mouth. After all, it wouldn’t do for a civilized man to vomit on the street in the sight of the good folk out for a cool lunchtime stroll.

Sawyer hurried to the lavatory. After many miserable moments of seemingly endless sickness spewing from deep within him, he collapsed against the toilet, trying to bring the dry heaves under control. A halo began to form around his vision, and Sawyer knew that a skull-splitting headache would follow as it had every time since the first moment that he had breathed in the cloying scent of roses at five years old.

Sawyer explained to the sweet hostel-keeper that he was experiencing a migraine headache and wondered if she could provide him with a private room where he could pull the curtains and ride it out. He promised that he would pay extra, but the grandmotherly Desideria Ferrari wouldn’t hear of it. She rang for her assistant to take over at the desk, then hustled Sawyer into the rickety elevator and took him to a cozy little flat on the fourth floor.

“I have this room ready for my grandchildren when they come visit,” Signora Ferrari explained. “You call if anything you need, Signore. Tea, food, I fix for you. Ay, povoretto! The migraine headaches are un fardello terribile. I pray you rest well and dream them away. Nel nome del padre e del figlio e dello spirito santo. Amen.”

“Grazie Signora,” Sawyer responded, grimacing. “Perhaps you could bring me a glass of water so I can take my medicine and I would appreciate if you might fix me a pot of weak tea and leave it for me to drink throughout the day. Molte grazie per la vostra gentilezza.”

Desideria brought Sawyer some water and he swallowed his tablets.

“Rubbish setback this is,” he sighed. “I’ve not been back to jolly old Crouch End since I left at eighteen. Hopefully, this is the nadir of this trip. I wished to be off to the London museum to see that glorious new Renaissance art display. Well, I’ve had to inure these rotten headaches putting a dent in me best-laid plans from the time I was a knee-high nipper so it’s not as if it’s taken me by surprise.”

“Eh, the art has been around since the Renaissance, no? It will be there tomorrow or the next day. You rest now, dolce figlio di Dio.”

The touch of the kindly old woman’s fingers on his temples soothed Sawyer, and he drifted off to sleep. She pulled the door closed quietly and made the sign of the cross before leaving.

II

Sawyer dreamed that he was exploring his old neighborhood. He walked through the gates at St. Thomas More Memorial Gardens, where he saw a couple in their mid-thirties standing beside a fresh grave. The man embraced and comforted the woman, whose back was turned to Sawyer. Her toffee-colored tresses swept below her shoulders. The man had loose, shaggy curls the color of dark honey that extended just below his ears. His ultramarine blue eyes were sad and weary.

Although the man had a mustache and lines had formed on his cherubic face, Sawyer recognized his old college chum Vance Collins. The woman could be none other than Amber Clifford, and Sawyer felt his heart swell with unrequited longing.

Danny Clifford was assigned as Sawyer’s dorm mate when Dan started college back in 2000 because Sawyer was a responsible student who stated that he didn’t mind having a companion with seizures and he didn’t mind dogs. Danny had a service dog named Vox, a four-year-old Alsatian who could sense when his human companion was about to have a seizure. Vox was as friendly and loving a dog as anyone could wish for and Sawyer said that he was probably smarter than a lot of the students at Reading.

Danny had a precocious seventeen-year-old sister named Amber who had been cleared to start her first year at college although she wouldn’t turn eighteen until October 29^th. Amber looked and acted older than seventeen. She was sweet but flinty. She thought that the rule prohibiting her from sharing an on-campus flat with her brother was utterly antediluvian.

“Who knows better than me when me brother is going to have a seizure?” Amber fumed. “Except for Vox, I’m the one who can best see the signs. I’ve been around Dan for all but the first ten months of his life. We’re practically twins. Oi, so do you know what I say, you lot? I say that as soon as this semester is over, we four find a flat or a row house close to campus and move there. I know that Vox is with me. What of the rest of you?”

“I’m for it Ambs,” Daniel agreed. “But if you haven’t your own loo, you have to promise not to take up the entire counter with yer pretty-face products.”

“Sod off, ya polyp. I ain’t got that many pretty-face products. Two of me pretty-face products are to prevent zits, and yer always using ‘em. Anyways, I take after Da. I’ve always thought me hair was me best feature. But there again, you use me hair stuff. So, don’t be a right cunt, aye?”

Amber threw a pillow at Daniel and he picked it up and bopped her with it. The pair laughed as they battered each other with pillows, and Sawyer, who was an only child, thought for a moment that it would have been fun to have a sister like Amber. A moment later he was glad that the sprightly young woman wasn’t his sister, because he realized that she was stunningly beautiful.

“I always thought that Gerry Clifford was a bit of an ugly gnome,” Sawyer confessed to his cousin Rod over a pint. “His attraction lies in his guitar playing, not in his looks, that’s certain. How the hell did he end up with feckin’ Sleeping Beauty fer a daughter?”

III

“Must have picked her from a cabbage patch,” Rod mused. “Best not shit where you eat, Mate.”

Sawyer recollected telling Rod to shove his unsolicited advice up his arse. He also recalled the fact that he’d turned beet red with the realization that his feelings for Amber were dead obvious.

“I ain’t planning on seducing her, ya great oik!” Sawyer protested. “It’s like that song says. She’s only seventeen.”

“Yeah, but that song also says she’s old enough for me. For you, that is. Not fer me. Like that other song says, I like my girls a little bit older. You’re only two years older than she is, Mate. It ain’t like it’s anything perverted. I’m just saying, if yer livin’ in the same house, it ain’t smart. If yer gonna date her, you need to live apart at first. Relationships that get too close too quick tend to crash and burn.”

“Yeah, arite, well I wasn’t planning to come on like a house on fire. I was thinking I’d let it build up over time so’s I can show that I ain’t just another one trying to get in her pants fer points like them pathetic blighters she’s told me about. You know, the sort of bastard what tries to get with the daughters of as many famous blokes as he can fer the bragging rights. Bleedin’ thirty-some and forty-some-year-old men trying to have it off with a teenage girl so they can tell their mates that they fucked the fabled Brain of Mainline’s daughter. Makes me ill to think of it.”

Sawyer’s consciousness returned to the churchyard. He supposed that Gerry must be the one that the family was burying. He’d been saddened to learn of Gerry’s dementia diagnosis but couldn’t bring himself to contact the family.

An elderly woman dressed in black strode up beside Sawyer. Although the crone looked impossibly ancient, there was nothing frail about her.

“It might be Gerry,” the old woman agreed. “But then again, mightn’t it be Daniel? After all, your chum had a serious medical vulnerability, didn’t he? Also, like you, he was drawn to the flavor of forbidden fruit, which can be deadly.”

“Sorry, Mum, I don’t understand what yer getting at and I ain’t sure you ought to be saying such things,” Sawyer admonished, stepping away from the venerable lady. The fact that he couldn’t see her face clearly through her veil unnerved him. Sawyer shuddered when the crone touched his hand.

“I’m not implying anything lurid, dear boy. I suppose I should have come right out and said that your old friend Daniel is being drawn in by the lure of the Annegare, the sirens who swim in the Cerenarian Sea. After all, what does one have to lose when one is sweet thirty-three and never been kissed? What does one have to lose when one’s life is defined by faulty connections in one’s brain? What does a man have to lose when his life is unfulfilled, and his dreams are bringing him delights that he doesn’t want to give up even though they may kill him?”

IV

Sawyer hurried away from the cemetery and back to the hostel. The old woman followed a few meters behind, keeping up with Sawyer although he was running, never increasing her pace faster than a brisk walk.

“I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming, and I need to wake up,” Sawyer admonished himself.

The crone did not follow Sawyer into the hostel. He breathed a sigh of relief as he ran up the stairs to the fourth-floor apartment, not trusting the rickety elevator to get him to his destination and fearing that the strange old woman might decide to join him.

Sawyer walked through the door of the flat and into the bedroom. He saw his body lying on the bed. A pot of weak, tepid tea and a cup sat on a tea-tray on the nightstand.

“Right, I just need to slide back in there and wake meself,” he declared, not wanting to feel the inevitable pounding pain and nausea from the migraine. Surely it couldn’t hurt to wait a few more minutes. He had a lot to think about, and he couldn’t do his best thinking while worshiping at the porcelain altar.

Sawyer realized that he had known almost from the start that his amorous feelings for Amber were unrequited. In the term prior to his and Daniel’s petitioning the University to allow them to take up residence off-campus so that Amber could room with them for the sake of convenience, Amber was at their dorm most of the time. One night while Daniel slept following a seizure, the pair sat on the couch talking.

Amber reached to touch Sawyer’s hair, but the words that followed indicated no romantic intentions on her part.

“You look so like Danny. It’s almost spooky! Same wavy golden-brown hair, same lopsided grin, same blue-as-the-skies eyes. Oi, are you a lost cousin, or is one of you a clone? I’m so glad you’re here for him, Sawyer. Bleedin’ rubbish it is that those dusty old farts in the administration wouldn’t let me room with me own brother when I’ve been one of his caretakers from the time we were kids!”

Sawyer agreed that it was rubbish, and he wondered how he could make Amber see him as boyfriend material rather than as a second brother. Perhaps he should have told her his feelings sooner, but he didn’t expect her to fall for Vance Collins, an affable chap in his art history class.

Vance was a year younger than Sawyer and a year older than Amber. He was a student in the filmmaking program, and he and a theatre major whose real name was Kaaren MacArthur but who called herself Cleopatra Pavlova had teamed up to make a series of artsy-fartsy feminist-themed films. Amber was the star of their Beauty Awakened feature, and she and Vance hit it off the moment they met. Even Cleopatra, the archetypal pissed-off lesbian feminist, admitted that the love between her mates was right bloody magical.

V

On the first Saturday night in May of 2001 when Amber, Cleo, Daniel, Sawyer, and Vance were sharing a house and Amber and Vance were clearly a couple, there was a party following Vance and Cleopatra’s shared final project for the year: a combined stills gallery and film extravaganza. It had been a great success.

Cleopatra and Vance were clearly smashed. They were chortling wildly about a photo of Amber’s buttocks where Cleo had placed an image of a dartboard on the right cheek and the image of a dart having hit the bullseye. She used a deliberately tacky font to title the piece “Epic Fail.”

“And this—this is the one that they all oohed and ahhed and bloody swooned themselves silly over,” Cleo cackled, showing the photo to Anna Kraynova, a petite, vermillion-haired theatre major wearing a yellow high-low dress that was nearly falling off her emaciated frame. Anna had helped design and make the costumes for Cleo and Vance’s film project.

Cleo was very fond of Anna, but she said that her feelings were protective rather than romantic. Sawyer wondered if Cleo was trying to save herself from heartbreak by telling herself that she didn’t love Anna, who was clearly troubled and in the thrall of an eating disorder.

“Doesn’t it bother you to see a picture of your sister’s bum with a target painted on it for people to laugh at?” Sawyer asked Daniel, who returned a scoffing snort.

“Mate, Amber is like me Uncle Paul. She’ll drop her knickers and show her arse at the drop of a hat, so long as she thinks it’s funny. Now, judging by the way she was standing in that photo, the original intent was artistic rather than humorous, but believe me, she had no qualms about allowing Cleo to paint a target on her bum and allowing the picture to be hung in a gallery for all to view. I’d not fear for Amber’s virtue. She ain’t a chippie and if anyone were to call her one for that photo, she’d tear ‘em a new arsehole, believe me, and Cleo would gladly join her.”

“Cer,” Sawyer agreed with a casual air that he didn’t truly feel. “I guess I ain’t noticed that side of Amber so much.”

“Yeah, but that’s ‘cause she respects you. She’s more than happy to show that side to me, or to Vance. Blimey! I wonder how long it will be until Vance is me legitimate brother-in-law.”

“Who can say?” Sawyer replied.

Back in the present, Sawyer was unsurprised when the crone strode into the shrouded room with Vox in tow.

“It occurred to me that my old mates may have been mourning absent friends,” he stated. “I was thinking about going and visiting them, you know, to see if I really was still carrying a torch for Amber or if I mightn’t be able to appreciate things as they are. I miss them, you know.”

The crone lifted her veil and Sawyer found that her face didn’t frighten him as much as he thought it would. He stood and walked to her, linking his arm in hers.

“I’m ready,” he said.

VI

Sawyer, Vox, and the crone walked through the door of the flat and down the hallway towards an archway of bright white light.

“Out of curiosity, when did you realize the truth?” the crone inquired.

“When I couldn’t get back into me body,” Sawyer said. “I knew I was ready to let go when I allowed myself to realize that while Amber is always going to be special to me, she was never meant to be my lover.  I had to know that before I could let go. Listen, Mum, that thing you said about Daniel and the Annie-whatsits. If Dan’s in some sort of trouble, I need to help him. He’s still me mate, even if I ain’t seen him in near to a decade.”

“Above all things, Daniel is a dreamer,” the crone replied reassuringly. “Surely you realize that spirits communicate better in dreams.”

“I suppose that’s so. Kind thanks, Mum. Oh, I admit, I was rather unsettled by you at first, but now that I’ve come to know you a little, you ain’t so bad at all. Anyways, Voxie wouldn’t have let you near me if you’d ill intent. Vox is a great judge of character. I still think he deserved an honorary medical degree from Reading.”

“I quite agree,” the crone concurred. “Daniel will be glad to know that both of his old friends are together helping each other in the next world.”

Acknowledgments

The Cerenarian Sea is part of H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands. It appears in his story Celephais, first publication The Rainbow, May 1922.

“Seventeen” is a power-pop song released in 1988 by Winger.

The line “I like my girls a little bit older” comes from the song “Your Love,” released in 1986 by The Outfield.

Prompts Used

https://mindlovemiserysmenagerie.wordpress.com/2020/09/21/wordle-207-2/

Strong

Setback

Milk

Cool

Deep

Inure- to grow accustomed to something undesirable

Nadir- the lowest point

Man

Hands

Sight

Touch

Lover

https://www.writersdigest.com/be-inspired/plot-twist-story-prompts-divine-act

For today's prompt, have something unexpected and uncontrollable happen.

https://blog.reedsy.com/creative-writing-prompts/general/write-about-a-character-who-smells-something-famil/

Write about a character who smells something familiar and is instantly taken back to the first moment they smelled it.

https://blog.reedsy.com/creative-writing-prompts/general/write-about-a-character-who-s-obsessed-with-an-era/

Write about a character who’s obsessed with an era they never lived through.

Translations

Povoretto = poor fellow

un fardello terribile = a terrible burden

Nel nome del padre e del figlio e dello spirito santo. = in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit

Molte grazie per la vostra gentilezza. = many thanks for your kindness