Idlebones

Next Door Part 1

 

 

 

I had awoken with a jerk. I was bolt upright in my bed before I realised it had been a dream. My bare back glistened in sweat, cooling with the light breeze than came in from the open window behind me. Even as I wiped the sweat from my clammy forehead, I could feel the dread ebbing away, my shoulders aching slightly as the muscles relaxed once more. For a moment there, I had to fight the urge to jump out of bed and tear into the front room to look out it’s window into the street for the Garda cars and Ambulances I had felt certain must be there. Blowing my cheeks out and letting myself fall back against my bed, it occured to me that Scott, my tenant, may not have appreciated his naked sweaty landlord bursting into his room at this hour. I glanced at the red LED display on the clock radio by my bed. Four am. Read the rest of this entry »

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Next Door Part 2

Later, Jessie and I drink frothy cappuccinos in the nearby coffee shop, both absorbed in our latest purchases from the St Vincent De Paul charity book store. I scan the back of my novel, as Jessica reads the first few paragraphs of her latest prison diary book. She has a thing about crime and punishment. Survival in harshest regimes that I kid her about. I tell her constantly that I’m convinced she’s researching ways to do away with me and plant me under a patio as she flips the page in her latest death row biography. It’s a subject Scott never likes to engage in, as we sit watching the football while Jessie works nights, for some reason. I think I just bore him with my talk of Jessica.

We both enjoy our books. Perfectly capable of sitting together, her head in my shoulder, as we read our seperate tomes, a gentle nudge or a squeeze reminding each other that were still there. Before she goes to work, we cuddle in our beanbag, in our spare room, silently engrossed in our books, listening to Nick Drake’s Cello song in the backround. Sometimes this leads to more. Moreoften, we just dissapear into each other, inseperable, and enjoying the silence that entwines two people who have become as much a part of each other as our own seperate limbs.

We fold into the beanbag beneath us.

She leaves for work at 9, leaving a warm empty indent in the beanbag beside me.

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Sophie & Paddy Ch 1

Chapter One

Sophies’ house nestled quietly at the edge of the forest that curled past the small town of Idlesdown, that was hardly a big enough town to be called a town. One main street rose in an arc from the narrow stone bridge outside her gate, passed the green post office where she posted her letters and pictures to her nana. Passed the newsagents where her daddy would stand and read the front pages of the newspapers, while her mummy would pick milk out of the tall fridge and, occasionally, a chocolate bar for Sophie. At the top of the hill the road passes two pubs stood side by side, before dipping down to by the hairdressers where warm blast of heavy scented air blew across the pavement whenever the door opened and chimed a little bell. Beside the hairdressers a butchers shop displayed fresh red and white meats, shining fish and sausages curled like knotted balloons.

By the bottom of the hill, the road curved gently to the left to avoid the tall heavy trees as the forest swept back around the town, almost covering the small white cottage that lay in a small patch of land overhung by lush green branches.

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Next Door Part 3

I busy myself with my half built rockery in the garden for the rest of the evening, making use of the bright summer dusk. By ten o’clock, with the sun losing it’s heat and finally disappearing behind the slates of my roof, I sit back on a the sleepers proping up the mound of earth and light a cigarette. I’m dressed only in three quarter length shorts and am happily caked in soil from the newly constructed flower bed, and sit like a small boy, one leg tucked underneath me and the other kicking the heel of a paint splattered trainer against the wood. Read the rest of this entry »

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Paddy & Sophie Ch 2

 

It was still dark when Sophie awoke. She was still lying in the same position she had drifted of in while her daddy had been reading to her, his last sentence still hanging in her ears. She opened her eyes to see he had gone, and her book lay closed on the sideboard once more, a tasseled bookmark poking it’s head out from between it’s pages. Read the rest of this entry »

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