Emerson Leese
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She didn’t come back to the phone so after a minute George hung up, put his jeans and trainers on and grabbed the car keys. It was 3.20 a.m. when he made it outside his house.
His mobile rang – the Crazy Frog ring tone. He’d gotten the frog when it first came out, before it became a pop star and started pissing off the population. In the space of a year, he’d gone from being uber-cool, to unimaginative and ultimately, to annoying – all because of the sound of his phone. He didn’t really care: he liked it. He answered the call.
“You wanker! Don’t you ever hang up on me again!”
“You didn’t come back.”
“I was making myself a drink is all. You could’ve waited until I’d made my drink.”
“But now I’m on my way to your gaff. If I’d have waited by the phone then I’d be still in the flat with just my y-fronts on.”
“Don’t get funny with me George Shillito.”
“Rachel, I’m getting into the car. I’ll be over in ten minutes.”
“George, I may well have drowned in ten minutes!”
“Stop screaming at me. I’m on my way.”
“Goddamn bastard.” She hung up.
He got into the car. The phone rang again.
“I want cigarettes, George. Get me my cigarettes.”
The line went dead. He put the phone on the passenger seat of his Citroen 2CV and reversed out of the drive before setting off down Balby Road. Women. The mad ones had been okay whilst he’d been using. He could cope with the screaming and the crazy when he’d been shit faced. He’d gone from one to another – each one more unstable than the last. They had to be fucked up to cope with him. It was a win win situation: he got somebody to wash his pants and they got somebody to blame for being fucked up. Sometimes he’d wash their pants and blame them for his fuck ups.
It had been years since he’d used but still he picked up the fucked up. Rachel was one of the craziest. Everything she did was worse case scenario. George knew what an hedonist was: someone who maximised pleasure and minimised pain. He didn’t know what the opposite was but guessed that it would be something like Rachel. Just last week she grew a spot on her chin and was convinced it was cancerous. She turned up at 9a.m. with a packed bag, and demanded that he take her to the hospital. George had invited her in, sat her down and whilst she wasn’t looking he burst the spot between his fingers. “See,” he’d said wiping the yellow pus onto his jeans, “you can’t burst cancer.”
He looked down at the phone beside him as if it were a bee that had flown through the window and landed on the passenger seat. Any minute he expected it to start buzzing angrily. He spent so long looking at his phone he didn’t realise the speed he was doing. That was okay though, because the police car following him did. The blue lights in the mirror got his attention and he pulled over expecting the police car to drive past in its pursuit of criminals. Instead, it fell in behind him. George looked in the mirror. There was no movement from the car behind, so he got out and lit a cigarette, blowing blue smoke into the summer night. Finally, a figure got out of the car and made his way over.